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THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


The  St.  Louis  Movement 

IN 

Philosophy,  Literature,  Education,  Psychology 

with  Chapters  of 

Autobiography 


By 

DENTON  J.  SNIDER 


ST.  LOUIS,  MO. 

SIGMA  PUBLISHING  CO. 

210  PINE  ST. 
1920 


CONTENTS. 


Part  First  (Apprenticeship) 

Chap.  I — Dedication ;  Beginnings 5 

The  Four  Elements  of  St.  Louis 15 

The  Fifth  Element  of  St.  Louis 24 

The  Alignment 31 

My  Romanic  Time  in  St.  Louis 38 

From  Romanic  to  Teutonic 48 

The  Great  St.  Louis  Deed 52 

The  St.  Louis  Hero 60 

The  Standing  Army  of  St.  Louis 65 

Chap.  II — Illusion  and  Disillusion 70 

The  Great  St.  Louis  Illusion 76 

The  Prophet  of  the  Illusion 82 

Some  Effects 94 

The  Economic  Illusion 102 

The  Eads  Bridge 107 

The  Illusion's  Antiseptic 116 

The  Great  Disillusion 129 

Chap.  Ill— The  German  Era  of  St.  Louis . .  138 

The  German  Overture 140 

Carl  Schurz  of  St.  Louis 150 

Joseph  Pulitzer  of  St.  Louis 161 

A  Book  Writer's  Life  Lines 174 

The  Book  Twins  Born 188 

The  Poetic  Element 202 

Life's  Central  Node 212 

3 


4  CONTENTS 

PART  SECOND. 

Part  Second  (Renascence) 215 

Chap.  I — The  Classical  Renascence 233 

The  Classical  Itinerary 238 

The  St.  Louis  Literary  Classes 254 

The  Concord  Philosophical  School 262 

After  School 278 

Back  to  St.  Louis 289 

Back  to  Concord 302 

The  Kindergarten  Class 315 

Psychology  at  Concord 320 

Finale  at  St.  Louis 338 

Finale  at  Concord 350 

Some  Results 361 

A  Writer  of  Books 373 

Chap.  II — Renascence  Evolved 393 

The  New  Mythical  Setting 410 

The  Double  Transfer 418 

The  Literary  Bibles 431 

The  Wanderer 443 

Goethe  and  Dante 459 

The  Sigma  Publishing  Company 479 

Social  Chicago 486 

Chicago  Literary  Schools 519 

Backflow  to  St.  Louis 575 

The  Epoch's  Crossing 585 

Chap.  Ill— The  Psychological  Renascence. . .  590 

Appendix • 599 


$tart  Jftrst 

Apprenticeship 

DEDICATORY 

Fifty  years  and  more  have  passed  since  the 
phrase  The  St.  Louis  Movement  began  to  be  heard 
in  certain  limited  circles  over  the  country,  and  occa- 
sionally to  be  used  in  brief  printed  reports  of  the 
Public  Press.  To  most  people  it  only  meant  some- 
thing started  in  St.  Louis  for  the  fleeting  moment, 
a  little  bubble  of  the  time  soon  to  burst  into  lasting 
oblivion.  Undoubtedly  those  who  initiated  it  had 
a  vague  feeling  that  they  might  be  doing  a  germinal 
deed  of  permanent  and  ever-growing  significance; 
but  that  was  just  what  the  future  alone  could 
prove. 

Now  it  so  happens  that  the  present  writer  is  the 
sole  survivor  of  that  early  group  of  men  for  whose 


6       THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

designation  this  special  locution,  The  St.  Louis 
Movement,  was  first  coined.  And  in  one  way  or 
other  to  him  alone,  in  his  solitary  condition,  this 
same  designation  is  not  infrequently  applied  to- 
day. One  inference  at  least  may  be  made :  the  name 
still  persists  in  living,  and  with  it  the  thing,  or 
conception,  doubtless  hazy  enough  in  most  cases. 
The  subject  keeps  rising  to  the  surface,  asked 
about,  talked  about,  written  about,  thought  about, 
often  very  inaccurately  and  even  mockingly;  yet 
the  old  idea  somehow  will  not  die  and  get  itself  well 
buried  for  once  and  for  all.  Indeed  it  seems  to 
have  a  certain  weird  power  of  assuming  new  shapes, 
of  preserving  itself  through  multiform  stages  of  ev- 
olution, in  fine  the  uncanny  gift  of  re-incarnation. 
So  that  spirit,  or  ghost,  or  eidolon  long  ago  risen 
and  named  The  St.  Louis  Movement,  is  still  among 
us  and  at  work,  even  if  under  forms  a  good  deal 
changed  from  its  pristine  epiphany. 

The  scribe  now  addressing  the  reader  has  called 
himself  the  present  writer  with  a  bit  of  counterfeit 
modesty  which  he  may  as  well  henceforth  lay  aside, 
and  use  unblushingly  the  first  personal  pronoun 
without  any  mask,  however  transparent.  So  I  shall 
have  the  hardihood  to  say  that  I  was  on  hand  at  the 
primal  genetic  incident  or  historic  occurrence,  then 
very  minute,  even  if  gravid  with  long  life,  which 
can  be  set  down  as  the  first  beginning  or  actual 
efflorescence  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  whereof 
the  present  book  proposes  to  be  some  fragmentary 
record. 


DEDICATORY.  7 

The  foregoing  event,  which  may  be  regarded  as 
the  starting-point  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  was 
the  birth  of  the  St.  Louis  Philosophical  Society 
which  took  place  in  January,  1866,  after  due  pre- 
liminaries. About  a  dozen  gentlemen  assembled  in 
a  down-town  law-office,  according  to  agreement; 
out  of  this  number  two  men  stepped  forth  as  the 
original  founders  and  first  members.  One  of  them, 
the  real  originator,  was  chosen  President  of  the 
Society — Henry  C.  Brockmeyer,  then  a  practicing 
lawyer  in  the  city;  the  other  the  active  organizer, 
became  its  Secretary — William  T.  Harris,  then 
principal  of  one  of  the  Public  Schools.  Each  of 
them  spoke  briefly  his  inaugural,  emphasizing  with 
enthusiasm  the  prospects  and  purposes  of  the  or- 
ganization ;  both  failed  not  to  flash  some  prophetic 
lightning  upon  our  unlit  future. 

These  two  men  were  not  only  the  officers,  but  were 
in  essence  the  Society,  and  remained  such.  They 
proved  themselves  the  two  philosophers  of  us  all; 
they  might  be  called  Philosophy  incarnate;  it  was 
their  breath  of  life,  but  likewise  their  limit,  as  time 
revealed.  They  turned  out  very  different  from  each 
other,  not  only  in  their  lives  but  even  in  their  philo- 
sophic gift;  and  yet,  as  to  persistence  they  were 
quite  alike,  inasmuch  as  both  clung  to  their  favorite 
discipline  and  its  one  master  till  the  light  of  their 
days  went  out.  They  both  died,  as  it  were,  with 
their  favorite  philosopher's  favorite  book  clutched 
in  the  still  hand. 

Moreover,  from  this  time  forward,  I  became  more 


g       THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

deeply  associated  with  these  two  strongly  pro- 
nounced personalities  in  my  practical  career  as  well 
as  in  my  spiritual  evolution,  than  with  any  other 
living  men.  From  the  natal  hour  of  this  Philosoph- 
ical Society,  they  were  my  friends  and  fellow-work- 
ers in  the  same  general  cause,  which  goes  under  the 
name  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement.  Each  of  them 
wrought  in  very  different  fields  of  external  voca- 
tion; Brockmeyer  became  Missouri's  Lieutenant 
Governor,  and  Harris  rose  to  be  the  Nation's  Educa- 
tional Head;  still,  the  enduring  undercurrent  of 
both  their  natures  remained  Philosophy  to  the  last, 
and  just  the  one  Philosophy,  indeed  just  the  one 
Book  of  Philosophy.  A  single  remark  I  may  add 
here  about  myself :  my  life-stream  persisted  in  cut- 
ting a  distinct  channel  for  its  flood,  though  it  kept 
inside  the  same  St.  Louis  Movement. 

With  an  affection,  which  hopes  to  be  eternal,  I 
write  the  last  sentence  of  this  prefatory  note  to 
dedicate  the  present  history  of  our  common  labors 
as  a  monument  to  the  memory  of  my  life-long 
friends  and  associates: 

Henry  C.  Brockmeyer 
William  T.  Harris 


CHAPTER  FIRST 

Beginnings  at  St.  Louis 

Thus  the  Philosophical  Society  was  born  into  the 
world,  and  proceeded  to  its  work  under  its  two 
leaders,  certainly  minds  of  unusual  gift  in  the  line 
of  thought.  The  formal  Society  has  long  since  van- 
ished, having  been  soon  taken  up  into  the  larger 
and  more  lasting  St.  Louis  Movement  which  became 
not  merely  a  doctrine  for  the  few,  but  a  pervasive 
influence  in  the  community,  and  had  its  followers 
throughout  the  country.  It  must  be  remembered 
that  philosophy  brought  not  revenue,  but  rather  ex- 
pense. Each  of  us  had  to  make  his  living  by  some 
special  vocation,  which  gave  him  bread,  but  not  the 
bread  of  life.  Two  very  different  callings  we  had 
to  practice,  the  economic  and  the  spiritual,  and  this 
remained  the  discipline  of  a  life-time. 

Among  the  members  seated  in  a  little  group  about 
the  officers,  I  was  seemingly  the  youngest,  having 
just  passed  a  birth-day  which  tallied  me  twenty- 
five  years  old,  on  the  preceding  ninth  of  January 
of  said  year  (1866).  There  is  no  doubt  that  strong 
pulsations  of  Hope  burst  up  expressed  by  the  lead- 
ers, or  cowered  down  unexpressed  in  the  hearts  of 
the  rank  and  file,  among  whom  I  took  my  position 
in  the  rear  line,  but  always  ready  to  step  forward 
when  the  hour  struck. 

9 


10    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

Such,  then,  was  the  open,  explicit  starting-point 
of  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  though  evidently  it  must 
have  had  earlier  premonitory  throbbings.  The  two 
officers  of  the  Society  before  mentioned,  Brockmeyer 
and  Harris,  took  hold  of  their  work  as  men  already 
experienced.  Indeed  their  first  acquaintance  dated 
back  to  1858.  I  had  met  them  informally  at  a  small 
gathering  in  North  St.  Louis  the  preceding  autumn 
of  1865,  when  I  first  heard  them  plan  the  Society. 
Still  there  had  been  no  organization,  probably  no 
very  definite  purpose  beyond  the  mutual  benefit  of 
conversation  on  favorite  topics. 

It  may  be  mentioned  here  in  advance  that  our 
two  leaders  were  students  and  indeed  well-disci- 
plined followers  of  the  German  philosopher  Hegel, 
and  they  naturally  turned  the  rest  of  us  in  the  same 
direction,  though  the  Society  laid  no  claim  in  its 
Constitution  to  the  propagation  of  any  single  philo- 
sophic system.  Thus  it  was  in  principle  an  open 
tournament  for  the  best  jouster.  Moreover,  Harris 
was  a  zealous  missionary  by  nature,  as  well  as  a 
born  teacher ;  especially  in  those  early  years  his  zeal 
was  aflame  for  the  one  he  deemed  the  philosophic 
master.  He  had  all  of  Hegel's  Works  in  the  orig- 
inal, and  he  soon  found  out  those  of  us  who  could 
muster  a  little  German,  and  he  formed  the  design 
of  putting  us  into  an  inner  group  of  pupils  who 
might  become  agitators  and  promulgators.  The  first 
time  I  met  him  at  his  home  in  the  fall  of  1865,  some 
months  before  the  organization  of  the  Society,  he 
slipped  into  my  hand  one  of  Hegel's  volumes  and 


BEGINNINGS  AT  ST.  LOUIS.  U 

set  me  at  once  to  work  on  a  lesson.  He  would  even 
go  around  to  our  rooms  and  correct  our  transla- 
tions. At  that  time  only  one  volume  of  Hegel's 
"Works  had  been  done  into  English  (Sibree's  Trans- 
lation of  the  Philosophy  of  History).  Thus  the 
first  experience  of  mine  was  that  I  had  become  a 
pupil  in  a  school  for  the  study  of  Hegel.  That  was 
just  what  I  needed  at  the  moment,  so  I  eagerly  fol- 
lowed the  hint  of  Providence. 

The  situation  possibly  for  a  year  or  so  took  this 
shape :  I,  and  perhaps  half  a  dozen  others,  became 
the  free  pupils  of  Harris  as  instructor,  while  Brock- 
meyer  remained  more  in  the  background  as  a  kind 
of  overlord  or  higher  scholarch.  But  in  the  fall  of 
1866,  I,  wishing  to  see  and  hear  more  of  him,  en- 
tered his  law  office,  professedly  as  a  student  of 
jurisprudence,  but  really  as  a  pupil  of  the  Univer- 
sity Brockmeyer  in  person,  for  he  had  become  to  me 
a  personal  University  whose  curriculum  I  must  take 
at  least  for  a  year,  before  anything  else  in  this 
world  was  for  me  possible.  Moreover  I  bought  the 
entire  set  of  Hegel's  eighteen  volumes  in  the  orig- 
inal, and  began  making  explorations  in  that  philo- 
sophic ocean  on  my  own  account  and  at  my  own 
risk.  Thus  I  began  my  mental  circumnavigation,  not 
of  the  globe  only,  but  of  the  Universe. 

It  soon  became  manifest  that  there  was  one  book 
of  Hegel  which  uprose  the  lofty  center  round  which 
all  the  other  works  of  the  philosopher,  all  our  stud- 
ies, in  fact  all  the  thought  of  the  All  itself  gathered 
-—that  was  Hegel's  so-called  Larger  Logic.    This 


12     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

was  very  different  from  Whately's  text-book  which 
I  had  studied  at  College,  indeed  it  went  quite  the 
reverse  of  the  whole  line  of  treatises  on  Logic  from 
Aristotle  down  to  the  present.  This  Logic  was  de- 
clared to  be  the  movement  of  the  pure  essences  of 
the  world,  stripped  from  their  outer  illusory  vest- 
ure. Of  course  I  rebounded  from  it  at  the  start,  but 
I  always  returned  to  it  as  the  one  fortress  of 
thought  to  be  assaulted  and  captured  for  dear  life's 
sake,  wherein  I  was  helped  often  by  quick  flashes  of 
Brockmeyer's  lightning  insight.  This  book  has  the 
reputation  of  being  the  hardest  book  in  the  world, 
the  one  least  accessible  to  the  ordinary  human  mind 
even  when  academically  trained.  My  wrestle  with 
it  was  long,  intense,  and  not  wholly  victorious  at 
the  close ;  still  after  years  of  entanglement  I  pulled 
through  its  magic  web  of  abstractions  and  obstruc- 
tions, and  left  them  behind  me,  not  lost  but  tran- 
scended. 

Now  it  so  happened  that  an  English  translation 
had  been  made  of  this  book  by  Brockmeyer  about 
the  year  1860,  near  the  beginning  of  the  Civil  War. 
The  volume  was  handed  around  in  writing,  copied, 
discussed,  and  to  a  greater  or  less  extent  appropri- 
ated spiritually.  The  strange  fact  is  that  it  was 
not  then  printed,  and  still  stays  unborn  in  manu- 
script after  nearly  sixty  years  of  waiting.  Thus 
the  creative  book  of  the  system  was  never  put  into 
English  type,  and  has  remained  quite  inaccessible 
to  the  English  speaking  student.  This  to  my  mind 
has  been  the  chief  fatality  in  the  propagation  of 


BEGINNINGS  AT  ST.  LOUIS.  13 

the  work  and  its  doctrines,  for  it  always  has  had  and 
always  will  have  its  distinctive  appeal  to  certain 
minds  and  even  to  certain  times. 

Indeed  one  is  inclined  to  think  that  this  transla- 
tion of  Hegel's  Logic  has  had  a  peculiar  doom  hang- 
ing over  it  from  the  moment  of  its  first  written 
line.  I  have  watched  it  more  than  half  a  century, 
now  rising  to  the  surface,  then  sinking  out  of  sight 
as  if  under  some  curse  of  the  malevolent  years. 
Personally  I  never  used  it,  never  needed  it,  I  had 
the  original  and  could  read  it  more  easily  than 
Brockmeyer's  English,  which  on  the  whole  was 
very  literal — so  literal  that  I  often  had  to  turn 
back  to  the  German,  in  order  to  understand  the 
English.  Here  was  supposed  to  be  the  first  duty 
of  the  Philosophical  Society :  to  revise  and  pay  for 
publishing  this  central  work;  still  we  never  seri- 
ously started.  Harris  might  have  printed  it  in  his 
Journal,  but  for  some  reason  or  other  which  to  this 
day  remains  conjectural,  he  would  not.  I  found 
Brockmeyer  re-translating  the  original  on  his  re- 
turn from  the  Indians  in  the  early  nineties.  And 
I  saw  him  thumbing  over  the  manuscript  only  a  few 
days  before  his  death  in  1906.  It  was  his  one  Su- 
preme Book,  his  Bible ;  it  meant  to  him  more  than 
any  other  human  production,  and  was  probably  the 
source  of  his  great  spiritual  transformation  from 
social  hostility  and  inner  discord  and  even  anarch- 
ism, to  a  reconciliation  with  his  government  and  in- 
deed with  the  World-Order,  after  his  two  maddened 
flights  from  civilization. 


X4    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

So  our  Philosophical  Society,  and  after  it  the  St. 
Louis  Movement,  had  its  weird  Book  of  Fate  inter- 
woven through  it  from  the  first  yet  never  fully 
realized  at  the  last,  in  print  or  otherwise.  And  a 
similar  lot  befell  our  President  Brockmeyer  him- 
self, who  to  my  mind  represented  Genius  born  but 
never  fully  realized  in  print  or  otherwise.  And 
must  not  something  of  the  kind  be  said  of  St.  Louis 
herself  ?  But  that  man  and  his  sole  volume,  both  of 
unwon  destiny,  will  often  peer  out  of  this  narrative 
for  a  moment,  as  the  stream  flows  on  toward  the 
outlet.  Our  Secretary,  Harris,  had  also  his  life- 
long wrestle  with  this  same  elusive,  if  not  illusive, 
Book  of  Fate,  which  caught  and  held  him  in  its  sub- 
tle labyrinthine  texture  of  finest-spun  metaphysic. 

Undoubtedly  we  all  partook  of  the  character  of 
our  communal  environment.  My  stay  in  St.  Louis 
caused  me  to  share  in  its  innermost  life,  and  had 
the  effect  of  making  me  believe  that  in  it  lurked  a 
greater  possibility  than  in  any  other  city  of  the 
West,  if  not  of  the  whole  United  States.  This  huge 
dreamy  potentiality  of  civic  grandeur  we  all  be- 
lieved to  be  quite  on  the  point  of  pitching  over  into 
a  colossal  reality.  Just  that  was  the  strongest,  most 
pronounced  trait  of  the  town  at  this  time :  it  clung 
to  an  unquestioning  faith  in  its  own  indefeasible 
fortune.  This  was  bound  to  come,  and  in  a  hurry ; 
we  did  not  even  need  to  fight  for  our  greatness,  it 
would  be  forced  upon  us.  And  we  did  not  seriously 
fight  for  it,  but  with  calm*  resignation  awaited  the 
resistless  downpour  of  riches,  population,  and  life's 


THE  FOUR  ELEMENTS  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  15 

other  blessings  from  the  fascinated  Gods.  Such 
was  the  divine  belief  which  became  a  kind  of  St. 
Louis  religion,  and  entered  deeply  into  the  char- 
acter of  the  city,  of  the  individual  citizens,  not  spar- 
ing the  philosophers  whose  special  claim  was  to 
pierce  to  the  Pure  Essences  underneath  all  lying 
Appearances.  Certainly  I  was  not  an  exempt. 
Hence  when  the  prophet  came  voicing  to  our  ears 
what  lay  already  in  our  hearts:  Behold,  St.  Louis 
the  Future  Great  City  of  the  World,  we  all  accepted 
it  as  a  divinely  sent  Gospel,  as  very  Truth  denuded 
of  all  her  illusory  drapery. 

In  my  own  case  through  this  long  deep  partici- 
pation in  our  city's  most  fateful  experience,  a  bond 
of  the  spirit  was  formed  which  all  my  absences,  de- 
feats, disillusions  have  not  wholly  shattered.  Where- 
of I  hope  to  erect  in  the  present  book  a  little  me- 
morial. 


The  Four  Elements  op  St.  Louis 

"Tell  us  without  going  further,"  I  hear  my 
alert  reader  demanding,  "what,  who  is  this  St. 
Louis  of  yours  ?  Analyze  her  a  little  for  us,  that  we 
may  catch  some  notion  of  the  original  stuff  of  which 
she  may  be  composed.  As  she  too  must  have  a  soul, 
which  has  become  so  deeply  ingrown  with  yours, 
can  you  not  draw  a  slight  sketch  of  her  elemental 
psychology  ? ' ' 

Let  it  be  said  at  once  in  reply  that  I  asked  a  sim- 


IQ     THE  ST.  LOVIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

ilar  question  as  I  took  my  early  surveys  of  the  city, 
which  finally  revealed  to  my  prying  vision  several 
heterogenous  cleavages  or  layers  in  its  folk,  not 
simply  ethnical  but  pronouncedly  cultural.  Various 
nations  were  indeed  present  and  active,  but  more 
fundamentally  various  cultures  were  present  and 
active.  Of  these  I  shall  first  give  some  reckoning, 
as  I  understand  them. 

My  studies  of  the  city  taken  as  a  whole  soon  led 
me  to  see  in  it  four  distinct  strains,  not  so  much 
national  or  racial  as  spiritual,  which  have  held  their 
way  alongside  of  one  another,  touching  on  the 
edges,  intermingling  at  times,  but  often  secretly  or 
openly  colliding.  To  this  inner  fundamental 
separation  may  be  in  part  ascribed  that  lack  of 
communal  unity  and  enterprise  which  has  been  so 
many  times  noted  by  impartial  and  even  friendly 
observers.  St.  Louis  has  seemed  cut  not  merely  in 
two  but  in  four  down  to  its  very  soul,  which 
deepest  scission  has  been  in  part  the  ground-work 
of  its  fate. 

On  a  number  of  sides  I  began  to  come  upon  this 
ultimate  fact  in  the  course  of  my  experience.  Still 
I  clung  to  the  city  and  shared  its  hope.  The  St. 
Louis  Movement,  being  of  a  cultural  character,  thus 
fell  athwart  other  and  older  cultures  already  inocu- 
lated and  bearing  fruit.  I  have  often  tried  to  think 
that  this  on  the  whole  was  the  city's  advantage,  per- 
chance its  opportunity.  For  these  four  diverse  and 
somewhat  antagonistic  streams  of  human  spirit 
were  mutually  limiting  and  to  a  degree  mutually 


THE  FOUR  ELEMENTS  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  17 

neutralizing,  so  that  the  field  was  open  for  any  new 
doctrine,  which  a  single  dominant  belief  or  estab- 
lished creed  might  persecute  or  undermine  or  even 
openly  suppress. 

These  four  cultural  elements  which  I  found  here 
distinctly  marked  off  when  I  arrived,  and  which 
remained  deeply  graven  on  the  communal  character 
for  many  years,  and  are  still  not  wholly  obliterated, 
I  shall  set  down  as  follows :  the  Roman-Catholics,  the 
New  Englanders,  the  Southerners,  the  Germans. 
It  will  be  seen  that  the  division  is  not  strictly  racial, 
not  national,  not  religious,  though  race  and  nation 
and  religion  played  in  sometimes  with  no  little  in- 
tensity. But  the  profounder  and  more  influential 
distinction  I  believe  to  have  been  cultural,  being 
based  upon  the  deepest  spiritual  affiliations  of  the 
very  conglomerate  population.  Most  of  the  new- 
comers would  easily  fall  into  one  of  these  four 
classes.  For  instance  I,  rather  a  misfit  everywhere, 
was  born  in  Ohio  of  Southern  parentage,  but  was 
educated  at  Oberlin  College  which  was  decidedly  of 
the  old  Puritanic  type.  Hence,  amid  these  clashing 
elements  I  felt  myself  at  first  more  closely  related 
to  New  England,  and  even  let  people  call  me  a 
Yankee,  when  they  were  curious  about  my  an- 
tecedents. Still  I  felt  a  certain  aloofness  from  and 
ignorance  of  all  these  forms  of  St.  Louis  humanity, 
yet  with  an  intense  desire  to  know  them  and  even 
to  share  in  their  consciousness. 

I.  The  Roman  Catholics  I  place  at  the  head, 
since   they  were   the  most   numerous,   diversified, 


18     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

and  pervasive  element,  and  at  the  same  time  the 
one  with  which  I  experienced  my  first  contact,  to 
my  great  astonishment.  For  I  did  not  know  that 
the  Christian  Brothers  were  a  Catholic  Order  when 
I  engaged  by  letter  from  Cincinnati  to  teach  in 
their  school,  and  they  wrote  me  never  a  word  about 
religion.  Association  with  them  for  over  two  years 
in  their  daily  work  was  a  great  new  experience, 
producing  a  decided  expansion  of  my  mental  hori- 
zon. Toward  me,  though  not  of  their  confession, 
they  were  tolerant,  honest,  and  appreciative,  and  I 
tried  to  requite  their  goodness,  certainly  to  my 
moral  betterment  and  intellectual  illumination 
through  life.  More  intimately  than  ever  before  or 
since  I  beheld  the  Catholic  world-view  at  work  in 
the  human  soul,  and  some  of  the  characteristic  re- 
sults thereof,  perhaps  not  the  deepest.  Also  I  ex- 
perienced with  a  thrill  the  Church's  world-organi- 
zation when  some  Superior  of  the  Order,  a  monk 
from  Paris  or  possibly  from  Rome,  came  into  my 
Latin  class  and  examined  my  pupils  and  myself 
with  friendly  approval  in  broken  English.  Such 
was  my  Catholic  epoch,  no  negligible  part  of  this 
earthly  apprenticeship  of  mine.  It  helped  to  uni- 
versalize me. 

The  mother-church  in  St.  Louis  held  under  her 
wings  many  different  peoples  with  their  different 
tongues,  histories,  prejudices,  antagonisms.  The 
old  French  families  of  the  first  settlers  were  still 
in  evidence,  but  seemed  on  the  decline.  The  Irish 
held  ecclesiastical  sway  from  the  archbishop  down 


THE  FOUR  ELEMENTS  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  19 

the  whole  hierarchical  line;  their  zeal  and  energy- 
won  and  deserved  the  prize.  G-erman  Catholics 
also  were  numerous,  as  well  Slavic.  All  these 
different  and  often  recalcitrant  ethnic  elements 
were  fused  together  by  the  church  in  a  common 
faith  and  in  a  common  education,  so  that  they,  in 
all  their  diversities,  national  and  otherwise,  formed 
a  single  cultural  element  in  the  city.  Outside  of 
this  bond,  the  religious  primarily,  they  were  often 
inclined  to  fly  asunder  and  showed  cleavages,  espe- 
cially political.  Thus  Catholicism  was  busied  with 
its  peculiar  problems  in  St.  Louis.  As  far  as  I  re- 
member, it  never  had  a  pronounced  representative 
in  our  Philosophical  Society,  though  Dr.  Harris 
himself,  in  his  later  years,  showed  a  tendency  to 
Catholize,  as  some  of  us  thought,  through  his  sympa- 
thetic study  of  Aquinas  and  the  Scholastics,  as  well 
as  on  account  of  his  self-surrendering  love  of  the 
poet  Dante.  And  perhaps  in  his  universality  he 
could  not  altogether  omit  that  institution  which 
asserts  in  its  very  title  the  claim  to  be  universal. 
Here  it  may  be  added  that  two  other  members  of 
the  St.  Louis  Movement  manifested  a  Catholicizing 
stage  in  their  evolution,  without,  however,  crossing 
over  and  getting  inside  the  Church's  boundary. 

II.  The  New  England  element  I  may  place  next 
both  for  the  sake  of  contrast  and  of  similarity.  It 
was  the  least  in  numbers,  yet  the  most  homogeneous ; 
its  chief  cleavage  was  probably  a  religious  or  rather 
a  theological  one,  for  it  had  brought  along  to  the 
West  its  two  sorts  of  theology,  the  trinitarian  and 


20     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

unitarian,  with  their  accompanying  congregations. 
But  its  chief  cultural  power  and  influence  lay  in 
the  field  of  education ;  to  its  enthusiasm  as  well  as 
to  its  ability  must  be  largely  ascribed  the  city's 
system  of  Public  Schools  for  the  commonalty,  as 
well  as  "Washington  University  for  the  higher  dis- 
ciplines. The  majority  of  the  teachers  were  of  the 
New  England  mould,  though  not  always  of  New 
England  birth.  Indeed  American  popular  educa- 
tion had  its  unflagging  propagation  as  well  as  its 
origin,  in  the  land  of  the  Puritans. 

The  Public  School  was  the  main  though  not  the 
only  seed-field  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement.  This 
was  doubtless  owing  to  the  influence  of  Superin- 
tendent Harris,  a  born  New  Englander.  Washing- 
ton University,  decidedly  New  Englandish,  how- 
ever, held  aloof;  only  one  of  its  Professors,  George 
H.  Howison,  ever  became  an  active  member,  and  he 
quit  us  and  the  city  after  a  few  years'  domicile. 

III.  The  Southern  element  was  well  represented 
in  the  city,  and  put  its  decided  impress  upon  the 
same,  so  that  St.  Louis  might  well  in  one  sense  be 
called  a  Southern  city.  This  element  showed  itself 
in  a  pervasive  social  character,  and  still  more  in  a 
superior  political  ability.  A  strain  of  Southern 
courtesy  made  itself  pretty  generally  felt,  not  with- 
out its  streak  of  arrogance  perhaps;  but  the  crea- 
tive greatness  of  the  South  before  the  War  was  its 
gift  of  leadership,  especially  in  politics — a  gift 
which  has  shown  itself  emphatically  in  the  history 
of  St.  Louis  as  well  as  of  the  United  States.    The 


THE  FOUR  ELEMENTS  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  21 

leaders  of  all  parties  were  for  the  most  part  South- 
erners—of Union  and  Disunion,  of  Anti-slavery 
and  Pro-slavery,  of  the  Future  and  of  the  Past. 
Very  significant  is  the  fact  that  the  greatest  leader 
the  North  ever  had  was  a  born  Southerner — Abra- 
ham Lincoln.  So  in  this  city  we  may  cite  the  in- 
stance of  Francis  P.  Blair  along  with  many  others. 

But  in  St.  Louis  the  Southern  element  became 
hopelessly  divided  and  crippled  by  the  Civil  War. 
Its  leaders  gradually  failed  to  keep  their  political 
hold  on  affairs.  Indeed  the  South  as  a  whole  seems 
to  have  lost  in  the  Nation's  strife  its  former  pre- 
eminent gift  of  statesmanship,  which  during  the 
conflict  showed  itself  so  strikingly  inferior  to  its 
soldiership.  True  political  foresight  would  have 
kept  it  out  of  the.  war  in  the  first  place,  and  then 
after  the  Union  victories  of  Vicksburg  and  Gettys- 
burg, would  by  a  peace  have  saved  its  people  from 
untold  loss,  suffering,  and  humiliation.  And  since 
the  war  what  shall  we  say  to  Southern  statesman- 
ship? 

IV.  And  now  we  come  to  speak  of  the  strongest, 
most  emphatic  element  of  all,  the  German,  high  in 
the  ascendent  on  account  of  its  numbers,  its  aggres- 
siveness, its  general  intelligence,  and  its  unity  of 
spirit.  Against  the  German  solidarity,  based  upon 
education  and  military  training  in  the  Fatherland, 
and  brought  along  in  its  very  soul  to  America,  the 
other  elements  were  weaker  and  internally  divided. 
When  I  reached  the  city  in  1864,  the  great  War 
was  drawing  to  a  victorious  close,  and  therewith  in 


22     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

proportion  the  Germans  of  St.  Louis  were  rising  in 
authority  and  also  in  self-assertion.  For  it  was 
chiefly  through  their  strength  and  initiative  that 
the  first  decisive  blow  for  the  Union  had  been 
struck  at  Camp  Jackson,  with  a  victory  which  on 
the  whole  never  stopped  its  course  for  four  years 
till  it  had  rolled  down  the  Mississippi,  then  wheeled 
eastward  to  Chattanooga,  to  Atlanta,  to  Savannah, 
then  surged  northward  through  the  Carolinas  to- 
ward the  border  of  Virginia  for  the  final  struggle, 
where  it  was  halted  by  Grant  (so  he  says  in  his 
Memoirs).  German  regiments  from  St.  Louis  and 
from  Missouri  had  been  in  the  thick  of  the  fight  all 
the  way,  and  soon  were  returning  home  with  a  jus- 
tifiable good  opinion  of  themselves  and  of  their 
services.  Here,  accordingly,  the  Teutonic  spirit  was 
mounting  upward  in  lofty  self-confidence  compared 
to  that  of  the  other  elements. 

During  the  first  two  years  after  my  arrival  in 
St.  Louis,  I  stuck  pretty  closely  to  my  Romanic  ten- 
dency which  is  to  be  hereafter  described,  and  I  re- 
sisted any  deflection  into  the  swirling  Teutonic  life, 
though  I  often  brushed  its  edges  and  felt  its  urge  on 
all  sides.  But  in  1866  with  my  entrance  into  the 
philosophic  group,  and  through  my  intensive  study 
of  German  Philosophy,  and  also  on  account  of  my 
deeper  contact  with  the  new  communal  spirit,  I 
began  to  turn  away  from  my  Latin  bent  and  to 
Teutonize  decidedly.  Moreover  in  the  same  year 
(1866)  I  quit  the  Christian  Brothers'  College,  with 
its  Catholic  environment,  breathing  more  or  less 
the  spirit  of  the  Latin  Church  and  its  Latin  culture, 


THE  FOUR  ELEMENTS  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  23 

and  I  entered  upon  a  discipline  very  different,  that 
of  the  University  Brockmeyer,  as  I  have  elsewhere 
called  it,  to  celebrate  its  one  tutor. 

Such  were  the  four  cultural  elements  of  St.  Louis 
as  I  found  them  existent  on  my  arrival  and  at 
work  with  more  or  less  energy.  In  a  way  I  was 
sympathetic  with  them  all.  They  represented  the 
tradition,  religious,  social,  educational,  descending 
down  the  ages,  and  coming  from  abroad  to  our 
city  in  which  they  were  planted  afresh,  and  throve 
according  to  their  inner  vigor.  I  could  not  help 
noting  the  gradual  retreat,  if  not  defeat  of  French 
St.  Louis  some  time  before  the  battle  of  Sedan,  with 
which  it  seems  to  have  shown  a  distant  parallelism. 
The  old  French  Market  was  no  longer  French  but 
German.  In  the  country,  say  at  Florissant,  it  was 
pointed  out  to  me  that  the  Teutonic  farmer  was 
slowly  getting  possession  of  the  Creole's  land. 
Though  some  of  the  wealthiest  people  of  St.  Louis 
still  bore  French  names,  the  mighty  inrushing  and 
still  rising  popular  tide  was  German. 

Strangely,  during  these  same  years  a  similar  up- 
burst  of  the  Teutonic  Spirit  was  taking  place  on 
the  other  side  of  the  earth.  I  wonder  if  there  might 
be  some  connection  aerial  or  subterranean,  tele- 
phonic or  telepathic,  between  child  St.  Louis  and 
old  Fatherland !  Then  lay  we  here,  on  the  banks 
of  the  Mississippi,  not  all  by  ourselves,  self-ab- 
sorbed in  our  little  local  doings,  but  we  were  un- 
conscious participators  in  a  globe-encircling  world- 
movement,  which  revealed  itself  in  our  deeds  and 


24     THE  ST.  L0VI8  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

possibly  had  begotten  the  same  in  some  hidden 
genetic  kinship.  The  year  in  which  I  arrived  at 
St.  Louis  is  the  date  of  that  peculiar  modern  start 
of  Prussia  toward  universal  domination  which  was 
halted  only  yesterday,  and  still  lies  in  the  throes  of 
some  unfathomable  finale.  I  remember  that  I  felt 
the  first  early  throb  of  the  awakening  Fatherland 
in  the  animated  conversation  of  a  large  German 
boarding-house  on  Market  street,  where  I  swal- 
lowed the  talk  more  eagerly  and  more  easily  than 
the  potato  salad — a  dish  then  wholly  new  to  my 
taste  and  to  my  imagination. 

II 

The  Fifth  Element  op  St.  Louis 

Alongside  these  four  elements  of  St.  Louis,  all 
of  which  represent  the  realm  of  prescription  as 
handed  down  from  time  immemorial,  I  am  going  to 
place  the  fifth  element,  also  cultural,  though  very 
small  in  size  and  in  voting  power.  But  it  was 
fresh,  native  to  the  soil,  sprung  of  the  place  and 
the  time.  This  new  and  renewing  element  was  our 
St.  Louis  Movement,  which  arose  on  the  spot  whence 
it  took  its  name,  claiming  to  be  original,  autoch- 
thonous, like  only  unto  itself — unless  it,  as  before 
intimated,  was  the  product  of  some  influence  far 
deeper  and  larger  than  itself,  of  which  it  was  itself 
hardly  aware. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  its  members  proposed  to 
break  with  tradition,  which  dominated  the  intellect 


THE  FIFTH  ELEMENT  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  25 

of  the  city;  they  were  inclined  to  challenge  the 
whole  realm  of  prescription  derived  from  Europe 
and  from  our  own  older  Atlantic  States,  Northern 
and  Southern.  They  did  not  say  so,  but  they 
seemed  animated  with  the  spirit  of  the  Camp  Jack- 
son deed,  which  marked  a  new  turning-point,  even 
if  very  local  and  minute,  in  the  World's  History. 
A  vast  hope  lay  in  the  time,  in  the  city,  and  par- 
ticularly in  the  Philosophical  Society,  which  pro- 
posed to  reconstruct  the  whole  universe  after  some 
model  now  dimly  evolving  in  St.  Louis,  and  cer- 
tainly not  altogether  transmitted  from  the  Past. 

Perhaps  the  majority  of  us  were  by  vocation  pre- 
scriptive teachers,  but  the  traditional  Higher  Edu- 
cation was  to  be  rounded  out,  though  not  sup- 
planted, by  the  New  University.  And  some  such 
educative  institution  soon  began  to  sprout  up  in 
the  community  outside  of  the  regular  schools  and 
academic  instruction.  Let  it  be  said,  that  this 
free-born  education  now  in  the  bud  will  not  perish, 
but  will  unfold  to  flower  and  fruit,  keeping  up  its 
life  under  various  forms  and  appliances  down  to 
the  present  day.  For  instance,  just  this  month  the 
present  writer  is  still  maintaining  his  classes  in  the 
so-called  Communal  University,  which  took  its 
primal  genesis  from  the  St.  Louis  Movement. 

In  like  manner  the  traditional  religion  did  not 
satisfy.  Few  of  us  went  to  church,  though  there 
was  no  open  rupture  with  ecclesiastical  organiza- 
tion. Some  of  the  members  doubtless  kept  up  their 
old  religious  affiliations;  but  our  officers,  I  know, 


26     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

held  aloof,  yet  without  antagonism.  Still  the  most 
distinguished  clergyman  of  St.  Louis  joined  us 
somewhat  later,  for  the  sake  of  religion,  he  said.  He 
was  right  in  his  statement.  In  fact,  the  St.  Louis 
Movement  was  in  the  deepest  sense  religious,  not  as 
formal  but  as  universal ;  we  sought  to  win  a  fresh 
spiritual  communion  with  the  Divine  Order  and  its 
Orderer,  and  to  create  for  the  same  a  new  unworn 
expression.  But  to  accomplish  any  such  purpose 
we  had  to  throw  aside  the  old  carcass  of  tradition 
(as  Emerson  calls  it,  perhaps  too  disparagingly) 
and  to  begin  over. 

So  we  deemed  ourselves  going  back  to  the  original 
underived  fountain-head  of  young  inspiration.  And 
we  did  break  loose  from  the  four  transmitted  cul- 
tural elements  of  the  city,  as  already  narrated.  But 
what  could  we  do  in  our  emergency?  Whom  did 
we  grasp  for  as  spiritual  guide  in  the  shoreless  wel- 
ter outside  of  all  fixed  landmarks  of  prescription? 
None  other  than  a  philosopher  handed  down  to  us 
from  Europe,  and  the  necessary  product  of  Eu- 
ropean conditions.  That  is,  we  took  a  foreign  tra- 
ditional philosophy  to  countervail  the  tradition 
which  had  been  already  imported,  planted,  and 
taken  root  here  at  home. 

Such  was  the  deep  dualism  of  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment, the  dualism  which  lay  in  its  very  birth.  Many 
years  will  be  required  before  it  can  be  freed  of  this 
discordant  scission,  its  prime  original  sin  per- 
chance, of  which  it  is  to  work  itself  clear  in  a  long 
purgatorial  discipline,  whereof  the  record  is  just 


THE  FIFTH  ELEMENT  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  27 

our  present  narrative.  But  it  will  triumph  at  last, 
and  that  may  be  taken  as  the  happy  end  of  the 
drama,  at  least  from  this  point  of  vision. 

Accordingly  the  St.  Louis  Movement  had  its 
start  from  a  philosophic  motive,  from  a  system  of 
thought  already  formulated  and  organized  which 
we  were  to  master  and  to  apply.  Moreover  it  was 
a  system  of  idealism,  one  that  put  stress  upon  Idea 
or  Spirit  as  the  primordial  creative  source  of  all 
things.  It  was  a  great  and  necessary  discipline 
which  trained  us  to  see  underneath  the  mighty 
phenomenal  occurrences  of  the  passing  hour,  and 
to  probe  to  their  original  starting-point,  to  their 
creative  essence. 

The  time  was  calling  loudly  for  First  Principles. 
The  Civil  War  had  just  concluded,  in  which  we  all 
had  in  some  way  participated,  and  we  were  still 
overwhelmed,  even  dazed  partially  by  the  grand 
historic  appearance.  What  does  it  all  mean?  was 
quite  the  universal  question.  Of  course  the  answer 
varied  in  a  thousand  shapes ;  there  was  the  political, 
the  religious,  the  social,  the  economic,  even  the 
wholly  selfish  and  sensual  answer.  Naturally  our 
set  sought  in  philosophy  the  solution,  that  is,  in 
Hegel  as  taught  by  our  leaders.  A  great  world- 
historical  deed  had  been  done  with  enormous  labor 
and  outer  panoramic  pageantry.  What  lay  in  it  for 
us  and  for  the  future  ?  So  we  began  to  grope  after 
the  everlasting  verities,  the  eternal  principles,  the 
pure  Essences  (reine  Wesenheiten)  as  they  are 
called  by  our  philosophic  authority.     These  trail- 


28     THE  ST.  L0VI8  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

scendent  energies  of  man  and  of  the  world  were 
said  to  be  collected  and  ordered  in  one  book — 
Hegel's  Logic.  So  the  St.  Louis  Movement  may  be 
called  a  child  of  the  period,  a  peculiar  infant  in- 
deed, but  nevertheless  a  legitimate  birth  of  the 
time's  spiritual  struggle.  And  this  infant  seemed 
to  be  sent  by  the  time  to  a  world-school  for  its  dis- 
cipline. 

I  may  again  remark  that  this  pursuit  of  the 
Eternal  has  turned  out  to  have  had  something 
eternal  in  it,  at  least  up  to  date.  The  St.  Louis 
Movement  retains  still  a  quiet  life  of  its  own;  it 
never  won  an  uproarious  public  existence;  it  had 
always  to  be  sought  out  in  its  own  little  nook  by 
those  who  would  know  of  it  and  share  in  its  gifts. 
Just  this  week  for  instance  (October,  1918,)  I  have 
received  a  letter  from  an  inquirer  who  wishes  to 
get  information  about  "that  original  philosophic 
Club"  and  its  members,  mentioning  Brockmeyer, 
Harris,  "and  yourself."  Then  he  winds  up  with 
this  expression  of  opinion:  "That  is  the  most  re- 
markable movement  known  in  this  country."  Not 
everybody  is  likely  to  accede  to  this  view,  espe- 
cially those  who  have  been  bred  in  the  home  of 
New  England  Transcendentalism.  But  the  inquiry, 
with  others  of  the  same  sort,  may  be  taken  as  a 
sign  of  a  still  living  interest  in  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment after  more  than  five  decades. 

It  was,  accordingly,  one  of  the  spiritual  off- 
shoots of  the  Civil  War,  and  belonged,  I  have  to 
think,   peculiarly  to  the  West,  of  which   during 


THE  FIFTH  ELEMENT  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  29 

those  years  St.  Louis  was  the  central  and  most  im- 
portant, indeed  the  symptomatic  city.  For  the 
West  did  the  great  positive  act  of  preserving  the 
Union,  while  the  East,  valiantly  fighting  for  the 
same  cause,  did  hardly  more  than  keep  its  own  lime 
of  separation,  "the  Fatal  Line"  it  has  been  called, 
which  at  last  could  only  mean  division  and  seces- 
sion. There  was,  accordingly,  felt  just  in  this  city 
the  spur  to  discover  and  to  utter  the  soul  of  the 
Age's  Great  Deed,  for  it  was  peculiarly  our  own. 
"Find  me  the  philosophy  of  that,"  said  the  Spirit 
of  the  Time  to  the  philosophers  now  marshaling 
just  on  the  spot.  We  took  the  best  help  accessible 
to  us  from  the  past,  and  made  it  our  starting- 
point.  Soon,  but  not  wholly  at  first,  I  began  to 
feel  the  full  force  of  the  injunction,  and  rallied  to 
the  work,  giving  the  early  unconscious  strokes  to  a 
task  which  was  not  completed  till  almost  half  a 
century  later. 

So  the  fifth  element  we  sought  to  introduce  into 
the  cultural  life  of  St.  Louis,  and  preached  our 
new  evangel  with  no  little  unction  and  keen-edged 
enthusiasm.  We  claimed  to  represent  the  original, 
indigenous,  self-determined  soul  of  the  city  as  dis- 
tinct from  the  one  brought  hither  from  the  outside. 
We  were  in  a  revolt  against  the  four  imported  ele- 
ments, from  the  early  French  settlers  to  the  last- 
come  German  Forty-Eighters,  whom  our  President 
Brockmeyer,  himself  a  German,  branded  as  nega- 
tive— hostile  to  all  positive  thought  and  its  institu- 
tions.   He  was  a  good  hater,  altogether  too  good; 


30     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

still  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  high-bred  Latinists 
(Lateiner)  from  the  German  University  were  in- 
clined to  scoff  at  our  philosophic  master  and  at  our 
Movement  as  something  long  since  transcended  over 
yonder  in  the  old  country. 

Let  that  be  as  it  may;  still  the  reader  is  not  to 
forget  the  secretly  gnawing  dualism  which  lurked 
in  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  and  which  will  keep 
driving  it  forward  beyond  itself  till  it  reach  a 
higher  reconciling  synthesis  in  a  new  world-view. 
This  of  course  lies  many  years  ahead,  yet  it  has  its 
first  life-pulse  in  the  present  situation.  But  as  I 
look  back  at  the  Movement  now,  it  really  lapsed 
into  tradition  in  assailing  tradition ;  it  became  pre- 
scriptive just  in  its  denial  of  prescription;  it  took 
for  granted  what  it  never  granted.  I  must  have 
felt  somewhat  of  this  deeper  dissonance  from  the 
start,  for  I  never  could  quite  bring  myself  to  write 
and  publish  anything  on  philosophy  proper.  I 
deemed  myself  not  yet  a  worthy  initiate.  Then  I 
was  already  beginning  to  grow  a  peculiar  literary 
conscience ;  whenever  I  took  my  soul's  pen  in  hand, 
it  was  for  my  highest  self-expression ;  otherwise  I 
must  wait,  even  if  forever.  Nevertheless  I  pursued 
desperately  philosophy  as  the  one  present  remedy, 
as  the  universal  science;  if  its  warring  contradic- 
tion cannot  in  some  way  be  pacified,  then  the  uni- 
verse is  battle  and  becomes  Ragnorok. 

Of  course  I  was  at  first  unconscious  of  this  deep- 
est undercurrent  in  our  St.  Louis  Movement,  and 
only  came  to  recognize  it,  not  so  much  by  thinking 


THE  ALIGNMENT.  31 

it  out,  as  by  living  it  out  in  my  daily  activities  for 
decades,  till  the  cycle  of  discipline  might  be  fin- 
ished. Meanwhile  let  it  be  held  fast  that  this  far- 
down  underworld's  struggle  of  the  spirit  is  what 
gave  strength  and  length  of  life  to  our  St.  Louis 
Movement.  Indeed  that  antimony  of  ours  between 
tradition  and  non-tradition  may  be  deemed  the 
primal  originative  force  or  spring  of  all  individual 
culture,  as  well  as  of  civilization  itself. 

Ill 

The  Alignment 

A  year  or  two  since,  on  going  to  a  little  place  to 
give  a  little  talk,  I  saw  two  gentlemen  approaching 
me  with  pleasant  smiles ;  and  as  they  drew  near, 
one  of  them  held  out  toward  me  a  written  leaf  of 
paper  saying:  "Here  is  something  which  I  thought 
you  might  like  to  see,  your  name  is  on  it."  At  a 
glance  the  manuscript  proved  to  be  a  copy  of  the 
records  of  the  first  Philosophical  Society  reaching 
back  to  1866,  with  the  signature  of  the  Secretary. 
The  gentleman  went  on :  "  That  I  keep  as  one  of 
my  treasures.  But  can  you  not  tell  us  a  little 
about  these  people  here  named,  who  met  in  your 
society — what  did  they  become?  Tell  me,  who  of 
you  made  good?" 

Some  such  question  has  been  propounded  to  me 
several  times  recently,  indeed  I  have  propounded  it 
to  myself,  and  I  shall  try  to  write  out  my  answer. 
Perhaps  this  entire  book  bears  in  itself  some  re- 


32     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

spouse.  The  fact  is  most  of  us  were  then  undis- 
tinguished and  have  sturdily  remained  so.  And  it 
must  be  confessed  that  the  St.  Louis  Movement 
never  produced  a  book  which,  by  any  reasonable 
stretch  of  charity,  might  be  called  a  literary  suc- 
cess. Therein  it  strikingly  contrasts  with  the  Trans- 
cendental Movement,  which  owes  its  propagation 
and  its  permanence  largely  to  the  excellence  of  its 
Literature. 

As  far  as  I  now  remember,  the  Society  led  not  so 
much  an  active,  practical  life  as  a  rather  quiet, 
theoretical  existence;  chiefly  it  was  the  public 
means  to  show  famous  visitors  certain  formal  at- 
tentions ;  for  instance,  when  Mrs.  Julia  Ward  Howe 
came  to  town  and  read  a  paper  on  Philosophy,  the 
Society  received  her,  listened  to  her  lecture,  and 
even  indulged  in  some  criticisms,  to  which  she  re- 
plied in  veiled  but  sarcastic  reproof  of  our  philoso- 
phic egotism.  In  like  manner  it  heard  Emerson 
and  invited  Alcott,  the  famous  Concord  philoso- 
phers, with  whom  our  Secretary,  Mr.  Harris,  kept 
in  friendly  touch,  for  the  sake  of  the  future. 

The  real  work  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement  was 
done  individually,  or  in  little  groups  and  classes. 
I  cannot  now  recollect  that  I  ever  read  a  paper 
before  the  Philosophical  Society.  The  spirit  of  the 
Movement,  as  far  as  I  shared  it,  I  applied  to  Litera- 
ture ;  Judge  "Woerner  applied  it  to  Jurisprudence, 
and  it  colors  his  legal  work  on  Probate  Law; 
Brockmeyer  turned  it  into  Legislation  and  Politics ; 
Harris  made  best  use  of  it  in  Education.    The  St. 


THE  ALIGNMENT.  33 

Louis  Movement,  accordingly,  took  the  character  of 
a  subtle  pervasive  influence,  rather  than  an  organ- 
ized propagandism.  Its  life  pulsed  in  the  small 
coteries  which  met  usually  in  parlors  or  private 
rooms  for  the  study  of  some  special  book  or  sub- 
ject. In  this  fact  lay  its  chief  worth  and  its  per- 
sistence. 

It  is  true  that  a  certain  grouping  or  arrangement 
of  persons  and  their  philosophic  doctrines  took 
place,  as  we  gathered  to  discuss  some  theme  or  to 
listen  to  some  address,  or  even  to  read  together 
some  book.  The  situation  was  something  of  this 
kind: 

I.  The  President  or  the  Secretary,  or  both,  were 
the  central  figures,  ardent  exponents  and  disciples 
of  Hegel,  and  led  the  talk. 

II.  Then  came  the  opposition,  for  usually  in  the 
early  times  we  had  some  straggling  dissidents  who 
would  object  here  and  there.  Of  these  I  remember 
enough  to  set  down  three. 

(1)  Thomas  Davidson,  who  usually  upheld 
Aristotle  as  against  Hegel,  and  even  the  Greek 
world  against  the  Christian.  A  lively  and  ingenious 
Scotchman,  who  never  seemed  to  me  to  have  any 
particular  persistent  conviction.  At  that  time  he 
was  certainly  a  jolly  drifter  and  general  free 
fighter,  with  much  effervescence  of  erudition. 

(2)  Adolf  E.  Kroeger,  a  Fichtean,  and  trans- 
lator of  several  of  Fichte's  works  and  of  other  Ger- 
man books ;  also  an  upholder  of  Kant  against  Hegel 
in   many   warm    disputes.      He    belonged   to    the 


34     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

earlier  set.  I  saw  a  letter  in  which  Longfellow 
praised  his  English  translations  of  early  German 
poetry. 

(3)  Louis  F.  Soldan,  later  Superintendent  of 
Schools,  whose  general  attitude  was  neutral,  be- 
longing distinctly  to  no  side  or  perhaps  to  all  sides. 
He  was  a  student  of  Spinoza  and  Dante,  and  later 
had  literary  classes  in  Faust. 

III.  Finally  came  what  may  be  called  the  rank 
and  file,  varying  a  good  deal  with  the  years  and  the 
topics.  Here  I  properly  belonged.  But  we  were 
eager  learners  and  questioners,  being  generally 
sympathetic  with  the  Hegelians,  especially  with  the 
two  leaders,  who  had  really  something  positive  to 
give,  and  produced  the  general  atmosphere.  Num- 
bers of  good  people  may  be  put  here,  such  as  Judge 
Woerner,  Judge  Jones,  Principal  Childs ;  the  ladies, 
though  not  regular  members,  were  best  represented 
by  Miss  Mary  Beedy  and  Miss  Anna  Brackett,  both 
of  the  Public  Schools. 

This  was  the  situation  in  the  earlier  times.  Later 
came  a  group  of  excellent,  but  quite  different  peo- 
ple, such  as  Prof.  Cook,  Dr.  Holland,  Miss  Blow, 
Miss  Fruchte.  And  so  the  leaven  kept  working 
through  various  layers  for  many  years,  till  at  last 
the  active  spirit  seamed  to  lapse  into  a  state  of 
quiescence. 

Such  is  a  brief  sketch  of  the  first  general  align- 
ment of  the  Philosophical  Society,  as  I  recall  it 
after  some  fifty  years  and  more.  All  these  first 
members  have  passed  on,  though  a  few  out  of  the 


TEE  ALIGNMENT.  35 

later  groups  still  survive,  no  longer  in  the  buoyancy 
of  youth,  yet  active.  I  suppose  that  the  interest 
of  such  a  seemingly  fortuitous  society  is  that  it 
unwittingly  bears  in  its  bosom  something  perma- 
nent, some  living  seeds  destined  to  grow  in  the 
future  and  bear  new  fruit. 

How  long  did  the  Movement  last  ?  In  one  sense 
it  is  going  on  still,  as  already  indicated,  though  in 
a  number  of  ways  much  changed.  But  that  first 
impulse  had  its  own  life  with  rise,  culmination  and 
decline.  Different  participators  would  naturally 
chronologize  the  period  differently,  according  to 
their  experience;  but  to  my  vision  it  ran  about 
twenty  years  (1865-1885),  from  my  first  electric 
shock  at  touching  the  live  wire  in  the  house  of  W. 
T.  Harris  one  Sunday  afternoon  till  I  quit  St. 
Louis  on  my  wanderings,  not  to  return  with  the 
spirit's  renewal  for  quite  another  twenty  years. 
The  two  leaders,  Brockmeyer  and  Harris,  had  left 
the  city  some  years  before.  The  influence  lingered 
still  in  the  Public  Schools,  but  without  any  decided 
official  hold.  Moreover  the  city  itself  seemed 
changed  in  character;  it  passed  into  that  peculiar 
eclipse  of  hope  and  ambition,  which  lasted  nearly  a 
generation.  It  lost  its  leadership  in  the  "West — its 
commercial,  and  still  more  emphatically  its  intel- 
lectual leadership. 

Now  this  obscuration  of  St.  Louis  is  undeniable, 
being  fortified  by  fixed  mathematics  as  well  as  by 
floating  opinion,  and  has  become  the  most  enig- 
matic and  hence  the  most  interesting  fact  of  its  his- 


36     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

tory.  Like  old  Rome,  St.  Louis  has  had  its  period 
of  grandeur  and  decadence,  but  no  Montesquieu  or 
Gibbon  has  arisen  to  set  forth  adequately  its  re- 
cord. To  be  sure  the  stage  is  small,  and  its  decline 
did  not  involve  the  world.  Still  the  atom  has  to-day 
its  special  worth,  and  we  are  told  to  see  in  One, 
even  in  the  little  one,  the  All. 

This  pensive  theme,  however,  will  naturally  come 
up  later  in  the  present  narrative.  But  here  I  note 
the  fact  that  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  though  a  na- 
tive growth,  was  chiefly  cultivated  and  propagated 
by  men  who  were  immigrants.  I  do  not  now  recall 
a  single  born  St.  Louisan  in  the  set,  though  nearly 
all  of  us  were  born  Americans.  Still  the  Move- 
ment itself  was  not  an  immigrant,  but  indigenous ; 
that  is,  as  a  Movement  it  originated  on  the  soil  of 
St.  Louis,  and,  it  was  so  regarded  by  us,  since  it 
was  begotten  of  the  city's  unique  spirit  of  that 
time.  "We  claimed  to  be  of  the  present  just  while  we 
were  taking  the  past  as  guidance,  and  even  as 
creed. 

(Still  our  deepest  faith  lay  in  the  destiny  of  our 
city,  our  basic  belief  was  grounded  in  its  coming 
greatness.  This  belief  was  the  original  drive  which 
kept  throbbing  back  of  all  our  energy,  whereby  it 
overflowed  into  the  community,  and  created  a  kind 
of  University  with  its  studies  of  Art,  Literature, 
Education,  as  well  as  of  Philosophy.  We  sought  to 
be  worthy  denizens  of  what  was  already  forecast 
as  the  Future  Great  City  of  the  World,  and  to  con- 


THE  ALIGNMENT.  37 

tribute  our  part  toward  the  fulfilment  of  its  pro- 
phetic supremacy. 

Thus  I  had  fully  entered  upon  what  I  may  call 
my  distinctively  philosophic  epoch,  which  will  be 
my  chief  spiritual  interest  for  years.  But  I  had 
an  antecedent  stage  which  I  left  behind,  though  it 
remained  with  me  in  a  sort  of  subliminal  activity 
through  life.  My  strongest  aspiration  for  the 
mind's  past  treasures  lay  then  in  the  field  of  Ro- 
manic culture,  which  belonged  to  those  peoples  of 
Southern  Europe  whose  language  and  civilization 
sprang  from  the  old  Roman  world.  Now  this  Ro- 
manic spirit  is  held  to  be  the  antitype  of  the  Ger- 
manic spirit,  which  was  pushing  forward  with  such 
volume  and  intensity  in  St.  Louis,  and  which  had 
begun  to  take  possession  of  my  training.  Some- 
what of  this  pre-philosophic  phase  of  my  develop- 
ment must  not  be  left  out  in  this  self-construction 
of  mine,  since  I  shall  make  use  of  its  acquisitions  at 
intervals  duringmy  entire  life.  For  instance,  only 
yesterday  I  began  to  take  new  and  deeper  sound- 
ings in  French  Literature  on  account  of  the  granitic 
endurance  and  stability  of  the  French  character 
revealed  by  the  present  war,  inasmuch  as  I  had 
previously  believed,  and  France  herself  had  seemed 
to  believe,  that  she  was  frivolous  and  flighty  and 
even  decadent. 


405576 


38     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

IV 

My  Romanic  Time  in  St.  Louis 

The  tendency  or  mental  trend  here  called  Ro- 
manic (not  Romantic,  remember),  I  brought  with 
nne  to  the  city,  and  I  clung  to  it,  as  long  as.  it  was 
of  prime  worth  to  me,  on  account  of  certain  local 
opportunities.  In  particular,  I  wished  to  catch 
some  remaining  shred  of  the  French  spirit  of  this 
originally  French  town,  with  its  survivals  of 
French  speech  and  customs. 

Accordingly  under  the  above  title  I  am  going  to 
designate  a  brief  cultural  stage  of  my  young-man- 
hood, lasting  only  between  two  and  three  years,  but 
significant  in  my  spirit's  discipline,  since  this  sub- 
strate has  continued  to  rise  to  the  surface  with 
stress  at  various  turns  of  my  later  life,  and  insist 
upon  some  utterance.  I  allude  to  my  cultivation 
of  the  Romanic  tongues  and  in  a  small  way  their 
literatures,  Spanish,  French,  Italian,  all  of  them 
daughters  of  the  Latin,  each  with  her  own  distinct 
character,  history,  and  beauty.  They  imparted  to 
me  a  phase  of  my  own  self-expression,  and  an- 
swered a  need  of  my  spirit,  which  I  had  already 
felt  stirring  at  College,  but  without  any  oppor- 
tunity of  realization. 

In  the  fall  of  1863  while  loitering  at  a  second- 
hand book  store  in  Cincinnati,  I  became  acquainted 
with  Ignaeio  Montaldo,  a  native  Spaniard,  who  was 
teaching  his  mother-tongue  to  students  in  that  city. 
He  invited  me  to  join  his  best  class  in  Spanish, 


MY  ROMANIC  TIME  IN  ST.  LOUIS.  39 

which  met  at  the  home  of  a  lady  prominent  in 
literary  circles.  I  accepted  the  invitation  at  once, 
since  it  gratified  a  persistent  longing  within  me. 
The  result  was  I  bought  a  Spanish  grammar  and 
dictionary  on  the  spot,  took  a  brief  lesson  for  a 
starter,  then  went  home  and  studied  the  new  sub- 
ject till  after  midnight.  I  soon  caught  the  drift 
of  the  language,  being  so  closely  derived  from  the 
Latin,  and  hence  like  its  two  sisters,  French  and 
Italian,  with  both  of  whom  I  had  a  passing  ac- 
quaintance. To  learn  to  read  the  printed  words 
was  easy  enough ;  but  to  speak  those  words  in  con- 
versation, I  found  much  harder;  then  to  under- 
stand them  when  spoken  was  for  me  the  most  diffi- 
cult task  of  all,  for  an  ear-minder  I  never  was 
easily.  Hence  I  hunted  down  friendly,  talkative 
Montaldo  in  all  his  haunts  for  practice,  since  Span- 
ish had  quite  suddenly  become  for  me  an  obsession. 
Moreover  I  found  the  genial  Spaniard  very  in- 
teresting for  another  reason :  his  unique  character. 
He  was  a  red-hot  socialist,  the  first  of  the  kind  I 
had  ever  known;  in  his  fervent  propagandism  he 
would  lapse  from  his  Spanish  into  French  or  even 
into  broken  English,  till  I  would  gently  recall  him 
to  his  native  dialect,  reminding  him  that  I  could 
only  take  his  doctrine  in  pure  Castilian.  He  had 
resided  long  in  Paris  where  he  had  come  under  the 
influence  of  M.  Etienne  Cabet,  famous  French 
Utopian  of  that  time,  and  had  joined  the  latter's 
communistic  venture  known  as  Icarie,  which  had 
first  brought  him  to  America.    But  the  ideal  plan 


40     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

had  suffered  shipwreck  upon  the  hard  reality  over 
in  Iowa  somewhere,  and  had  left  him  stranded  and 
drifting  and  hungering,  till  he  reached  Cincinnati 
where  he  could  earn  some  bread  through  his  knowl- 
edge of  the  tongues.  But  he  clung  to  the  grand 
eomimunistie  scheme  as  stoutly  as  ever,  the  bitterest 
rebuffs  of  experience  only  hardened  his  conviction, 
and  made  him  ready  for  a  new  headlong  onset.  In 
other  words  I  deemed  that  I  saw  before  me  again 
the  actual  Don  Quixote,  the  most  modern  edition 
of  the  Spanish  knight-errant,  with  the  living  com- 
mentary on  that  masterpiece  of  Cervantes,  which 
I  had  merely  read  from  the  outside  hitherto.  Thus 
my  good  teacher  gave  me  his  best  lesson  without 
price  and  even  without  any  design  of  giving  it,  for 
he  never  could  get  away  from  himself. 

"We  became  boon  companions,  I  followed  him 
everywhere  to  hear  his  Quixotic  adventures  told  in 
lofty  laughable  Castilian,  as  well  as  to  enjoy  his 
fantastic  ideas,  while  I  would  note  and  then  diver- 
sify his  idealism  with  some  of  my  prose.  It  seemed 
that  I  had  quite  become  his  Sancho  Panza,  the 
faithful  squire,  yet  mirroring  counterpart.  After 
some  days  he  surprised  me  with  an  invitation  to  his 
modest  home,  where  he  whispered  me  he  had  a  wife 
and  two  fine  children,  girl  and  boy.  That  was  in- 
deed a  new  turn  in  the  adventure,  for  I  had  sup- 
posed him  an  irreclaimable,  unmarriageable  rover 
in  pursuit  of  an  ideal  world,  somewhat  like  myself 
at  that  time.  It  seems  that  in  his  community  he 
had  found,  loved  and  wedded  an  educated  French 


MY  ROMANIC  TIME  IN  ST.  LOUIS.  41 

woman,  who  had  also  emigrated  with  M.  Cabet  to 
western  wilds  in  search  of  the  new  social  order. 
She  spoke  only  rapid  musical  French,  which  I  un- 
derstood but  imperfectly,  still  she  interpreted  her 
talk  very  fully  with  a  runnnig  comment  of  gesture, 
intonation,  and  expressive  grimaces.  Evidently 
she  had  been  disillusioned  by  the  remorseless  fact, 
having  now  to  keep  house  for  two  children  and 
husband  under  no  laughing  conditions.  Icarie  she 
had  reason  to  remember ;  her  special  theme  was  the 
tyranny  of  the  autocrat  Cabet,  which  had  wrecked 
a  glorious  hope  of  social  freedom,  and  had  left  her 
and  hers  stranded  on  this  unfree  America. 

Thus  I  took  lessons  in  the  Spanish  tongue  and 
more  deeply  still  in  the  Spanish  character,  not  to 
speak  of  the  little  dip  into  Latin  socialism;  all 
these  kinds  of  instruction  have  remained  a  per- 
manent possession  during  life,  though  I  have  never 
done  much  with  my  Quixotic  acquisition.  But  after 
some  months  of  this  Castilian  revery,  I  was  roused 
by  a  fresh  sharp  thrust  of  the  economic  problem, 
and,  breaking  from  my  friend  and  his  dreams,  I 
took  flight  to  St.  Louis,  where  I  soon  lit  on  the  solid 
though  thorny  ground  of  making  my  own  livelihood. 

Replying  from  Cincinnati  to  a  newspaper  adver- 
tisement, I  received  the  appointment  of  instructor 
in  Greek  and  Latin  at  the  St.  Louis  College  of 
Christian  Brothers ;  I  was  also  given  a  class  in  Eng- 
lish Literature.  These  branches  were  easy  for  me, 
and  familiar ;  my  lessons  occupied  three  hours  daily 
for  five  days  of  the  week.     Thus  I  had  ample  time 


42     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

for  outside  study,  which  enabled  me  to  push  on  with 
my  Romanic  tongues,  Spanish,  French,  and  Italian, 
to  which  I  added  considerable  practice  in  my  Ger- 
man, since  I  found  myself  rooming  in  a  German 
household,  with  an  abundance  of  gossipy  neighbors. 
That  was  an  opportunity  which  I  dared  not  neg- 
lect. Spanish  began  to  fall  by  the  way,  for  I  could 
find  no  Spaniard  like  my  genial  Montaldo ;  I  often 
tested  my  Italian  grammar  at  the  fruit-stands  kept 
by  Italians,  paying  for  my  instruction  by  the  pur- 
chase of  a  dime 's  worth  of  apples  or  peanuts.  These 
people  could  understand  me,  but  I  could  not  under- 
stand them,  as  quite  all  of  them  were  Genovese  and 
spoke  a  horrible  dialect.  At  last  I  found  in  a  wine 
shop  a  poor  gray-curled  Swiss  Italian  from  Canton 
Ticino,  who  was  a  man  of  some  education,  and  who 
gladly  earned  his  frank  for  reading  to  me  an  hour 
a  day  from  an  Italian  novel  which  I  had  picked  out 
of  the  litter  of  an  old  book-stall. 

In  my  mental  history  I  deem  this  to  have  been  my 
epoch  of  supreme  linguistic  ambition,  which,  indeed 
for  a  while  wholly  absorbed  my  life.  If  the  reader 
will  take  the  trouble  to  count  them  up,  he  will  find 
that  I  was  employed  more  or  less  directly  with  seven 
different  languages  at  the  same  time.  In  some  re- 
spects it  was  a  useless  scattering  of  energy,  yet  I 
got  from  it  a  unique  experience  which  served  its 
purpose.  Quite  unconsciously  I  was  seeking  my 
own  self-expression  in  all  these  tongues;  I  was  lis- 
tening to  the  voices  of  seven  different  folk-souls,  the 
best  in  the  world's  civilization,  as  they  revealed 


MY  ROMANIC  TIME  IN  ST.  LOUIS.  43 

themselves  in  speech.  And  I  was  under  training  to 
find  my  own  right  utterance — a  supreme  object  of 
my  life.  This  was  my  distinctive  polyglottic  stage, 
lasting  with  fervor  between  two  and  three  years, 
yet  with  recurrences  all  my  days,  for  I  found  I 
could  always  resurrect  these  tongues  with  a  little 
labor,  at  least  as  far  as  I  had  acquired  them. 

Thus  for  a  season  I  sought  an  expression  of  my- 
self in  no  less  than  six  foreign  languages  beside  my 
native  English,  and  kept  building  in  this  fashion  a 
good-sized  tower  of  Babel  all  inside  my  own  brain. 
But  after  a  time  I  found  this  versatile  linguistic 
love  of  mine  getting  onore  and  more  interested  in 
one  of  the  languages  without  wholly  neglecting  the 
others.  The  favorite  became  now  the  French.  There 
lingered  still  something  of  the  old  French  spirit  in 
St.  Louis,  at  least  in  those  quarters  where  I  ate  and 
lounged  and  chatted.  I  snuffed  this  peculiar  atmos- 
phere the  first  days  of  my  arrival,  and  accordingly 
I  took  board  at  a  French  hotel  not  far  from  the  old 
Cathedral,  which  then  might  be  deemed  the  center 
of  St.  Louis  antique,  and  which  still  looks  down  at 
you  with  its  French  inscription  written  across  its 
forehead.  I  found,  however,  that  the  people  there 
could  all  talk  English,  French  having  become  a 
mere  by-play.  Still  the  place  remains  to  me  ever 
memorable,  since  here  I  first  saw  the  unique  physi- 
ognomy of  Brockmeyer,  just  fresh  from  the  forest, 
as  he  would  fleet  eagerly  into  the  dining-room,  and 
then  saunter  out  of  it  leisurely  with  the  rest  of  us, 
ever  darting  the  sudden  eye-shot  of  the  backwoods' 


44     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

hunter,  rather  than  the  though  ted  look  of  the  much- 
civilized  philosopher. 

But  my  appetite  for  French  was  not  satisfied 
there,  though  the  eating  was  good.  On  inspecting 
the  wider  neighborhood,  I  found  three  other  French 
boarding-houses,  of  which  one  in  the  same  general 
locality  just  fitted  my  plan,  if  not  my  palate.  For 
the  proprietor  and  his  wife  with  servants  could 
hardly  say  a  word  of  English,  and  understood  none ; 
so  I  had  to  talk  French  or  do  without  my  dinner. 
Moreover  I  discovered  soon  that  in  the  evening  the 
place  was  the  resort  of  a  strange  lot  of  French 
characters,  who  gathered  there  to  drink  wine  or  ab- 
sinthe, sip  strong  coffee,  and  play  piquet,  talking 
meanwhile  French  politics  with  illimitable  babble. 
Most  of  them  were  fiery  republicans,  refugees,  revo- 
lutionists, socialists,  anarchists,  hot  against  State 
and  Church.  I  thought  I  saw  there  a  living  pres- 
entation of  Carlyle's  French  Revolution,  in  bloody 
words  and  gesticulations,  but  not  in  bloody  deeds. 
I  recollect,  however,  that  the  place  contained  one 
hardy  Clerical  who  by  his  opposition  could  set  a 
dozen  tongues  into  a  furious  clatter,  which  once 
ended  in  a  brawl.  A  single  Napoleonist  had  even 
greater  power  of  irritation,  inasmuch  as  most  of 
these  fellows  had  been  forced  to  flee  from  the  Em- 
peror's police.  Thus  I  was  again  taking  a  double 
lesson:  in  the  French  tongue  and  in  French  life, 
here  manifesting  one  of  its  famous  historic  phases. 
(Remember  that  Emperor  Napoleon  III  was  still 
on  his  throne.) 


MY  ROMANIC  TIME  IN  ST.  LOUIS.  45 

Naturally  I  took  to  reading  French,  especially 
books  about  the  French  Revolution,  of  which  I  saw 
a  fragment  enacted  before  me  every  night.  There 
lie  now  under  my  eyes  on  the  table  my  annotations 
to  Lamartine's  Les  Girondins,  which  work  I  bought 
in  the  original  and  read  with  many  an  excited  re- 
flection on  our  own  Civil  War,  in  which  I  had  just 
lived  through  a  deeply  sympathetic  part  theoret- 
ically and  practically.  This  reading  of  mine  is 
dated  1865,  when  the  mighty  upheavals  and  re- 
surgences of  French  liberty  had  ended  in  the  sod- 
den despotism  of  the  third  Napoleon.  Was  our  re- 
public to  suffer  a  like  fate  ?  Some  of  that  company 
would  say  so  in  pretentious  pessimistic  prophecy, 
whereupon  I  would  splutter  bits  of  bad  French  at 
them,  using  them  as  targets  for  practicing  both  my 
patriotism  and  my  grammar. 

I  longed  to  see  some  representatives  of  the  old 
French  settlers  who  with  their  descendants  had  been 
on  the  ground  just  about  a  century  if  we  date  the 
founding  of  St.  Louis  by  Laclede  in  1764.  But  not 
a  Creole,  if  such  be  the  right  name,  ever  showed 
his  face  among  ihe  Church-defying  revolutionaries 
fortressed  across  the  street  from  the  Cathedral  in 
Combe 's  boarding-house,  which  mad  hostelry  would 
have  appeared  to  him  an  Inferno  full  of  devils. 
Only  once  an  innocent  Canadian,  and  especially  in- 
nocent of  English,  strayed  into  the  place,  seeing  on 
the  sign  Pension  Frangaise.  I  noticed  him  at  once 
and  took  him  in  charge,  finding  him  a  fresh  angelic 
arrival  from  the  paradise  of  Quebec,  but  now  fallen 


46     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

into  this  real  Dantesque  Malebolge,  through  which 
I  too  was  traveling  as  a  kind  of  onlooking  Dante. 
At  some  horrible  blasphemy,  I  suppose,  for  the 
word  was  not  clear  to  me,  but  must  have  been  well 
understood  by  him,  re-echoed  as  it  was  with  the  dia- 
bolic grins  and  grimaces  of  the  whole  rabblement, 
he  ran  out  into  the  dark.  I  went  after  him,  and 
asked  him  where  he  was  going.  He  said  he  did  not 
know.  I  begged  him:  "Come  then  with  me,  and 
I  shall  take  you  to  a  French  priest  who  lives  over 
yonder  at  the  Cathedral,"  and  after  a  short  walk 
I  pointed  toward  the  imposing  structure  with  its 
spire,  and  the  clergy-house  alongside.  I  offered  to 
cross  the  street  with  him,  when  the  fellow  suddenly 
picked  up  his  heels,  and  giving  three  leaps  disap- 
peared within  the  church  door,  whither  of  course  I 
did  not  try  to  pursue  him.  But  as  he  slid  inside, 
he  glowered  around  at  me,  with  a  look  of  having  es- 
caped from  the  demons. 

Thus  the  time  brought  me  a  vivid  personal  ex- 
perience of  revolutionary  France  just  here  in  St. 
Louis,  a  living  commentary  upon  her  history  past 
and  also  future.  "When  some  six  or  seven  years 
later,  I  read  of  the  doings  of  the  Paris  Commune 
after  the  Franco-Prussian  War,  I  felt  that  I  had 
seen  and  heard  them  in  prophecy  already  at  that 
French  boarding-house.  In  fact,  a  few  years  later 
during  1870  my  interest  returned  with  such  inten- 
sity that  I  sought  my  old  quarters  there,  but  the 
spirit  had  fled.  I  found,  however,  a  red-republican 
French  Club  in  the  same  locality,  but  it  was  tame, 


MY  ROMANIC  TIME  IN  ST.  LOUIS.  47 

quite  orderly,  and  all  its  words  and  deeds  seemed 
to  spell  France's  humiliation.  Still  later  in  1878 
.when  I  was  in  Paris,  I  never  could  find  there  the 
anarchic  vigor  of  my  old  French  boarding-house  in 
St.  Louis,  except  once  perhaps — that  was  at  a  the- 
atrical representation  of  the  famous  anti-clerical 
play,  Moliere's  Tartuffe,  in  the  Latin  Quarter, 
when  a  rather  jolly  Pandemonium  suddenly  erupted 
out  of  the  huge  audience,  in  which  a  woman  (pos- 
sibly Louise  Michel  herself)  seemed  the  chief  vol- 
canic spouter,  the  whole  becoming  quiet  again  in  a 
few  minutes. 

So  I  now  renew  in  aged  image  my  young  and 
yare  Romanic  St.  Louis  of  more  than  half  a  cen- 
tury agone.  Only  yesterday  the  love  of  reminis- 
cence enticed  me  to  take  another  stroll  before  the 
old  Cathedral,  and  hearken  to  the  call  of  its  French 
inscription  which  seems  now  to  speak  more  deeply 
out  of  its  heart  than  ever  before.  Through  the  war 
the  Latin  peoples,  and  especially  the  French,  have 
uprisen  from  a  subsidence  and  supposed  decline  to 
a  new  birth  and  grander  eminence  in  the  World's 
History.  They  have  done  the  supreme  historic  act, 
having  overmade  themselves  into  the  conqueror  of 
their  conqueror.  But  does  that  old  fiend  of  Terror, 
whose  passing  shadow  I  once  saw  in  Romanic  St. 
Louis,  yet  lurk  in  the  French  soul?  Half-sup- 
ressed  voices  fitfully  fly  hitherward  over  the  ocean, 
reporting  that  it  is  still  alive  and  at  work  to-day 
underneath  Paris.  Will  it  again  break  up  to  the 
surface  and  have  another  spell  of  seismic  upheaval 
as  twice  before  ? 


48     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 


From  Romanic  to  Teutonic 

So  the  old,  deep  dualism  of  Europe,  starting  long 
before  the  Christian  Era,  and  continued  with  more 
or  less  virulence  through  all  the  intervening  ages 
till  the  present  moment — the  ever-grinding  dualism 
between    Roma    and    Teutonia — has    migrated    to 
America  and  especially  has  settled  down  in  our  St. 
Louis,  bringing  that  same  world-historical  conflict 
along  with  itself,  political,  religious,  cultural.      I 
seemed  to  fall  right  into  the  middle  of  this  many- 
centuried  clash,  being  sensitive    to    the    poignant 
thrusts  from  both  these  mighty  opposites  of  the 
ages,  with  their  everlasting  alternation  between  rise 
and  fall,  victory  and  defeat,  Guilt   and   Nemesis. 
Not  fifty  years  ago  Ronna,  in  her  representative 
Latin  race,  seemed  to  be  drooping  toward  her  last 
sundown  in  France;  but  now  in  this  New  Year  of 
1919  military  Teutonia  appears  to  have  marched 
valiantly  into  her  own  bloody,  perchance  mortal 
eclipse.    Thus  the  oscillation  has  continued,  begin- 
ning historically,  if  not  before  at  least  with  that 
ancient  invasion  of  France  by  the  Teutones  who 
were  overwhelmed  and  destroyed  by  the  Roman 
general    Marius    102    years  Before  Christ.     Then 
with  the  centuries  came  the  furious  counterstroke, 
the  defeat  and  capture  of  Roma  herself  in  person 
by  these  Teutonic  peoples.    And  that  by  no  means 
stopped  the  ever-recurring  world-duel.    So  the  san- 
guinary see-saw  between  Europe's  two  halves  has 


FROM  ROMANIC  TO  TEUTONIC.  49 

been  going  on  for  2000  years  and  more,  the  last  gory 
oscillation  being  ended  to-day,  if  it  really  has 
ended. 

And  the  case  would  seem,  if  we  may  judge  by  the 
past,  that  Europe  of  herself  is  unable  to  heal  this 
deepest  rent  of  her  own  soul,  as  well  as  of  her  body, 
without  some  foreign  mediator,  some  reconciling 
third  world-people,  who  can  medicine  her  ever  re- 
opening and  fresh-bleeding  wound  with  a  new  insti- 
tutional order.  Is  America  to  furnish  that  remedial 
folk,  which  may  be  able  to  redintegrate  unhappy 
Europe,  torn  into  warring  pieces,  from  her  birth? 
Our  army  of  doctors,  first  military  and  now  polit- 
ical, have  gone  to  the  seat  of  trouble,  and  are  still 
engaged  in  their  task  of  restoration  at  this  moment. 
Probably  the  patient  is  not  curable  at  once,  still  the 
beginning  may  be  tried,  with  the  whole  world  in 
anxiety  looking  on  at  the  bedside. 

But  our  present  interest  is  to  note  that  this  deep- 
est dualism  of  Europe — it  is  not  the  only  one  but 
the  deepest — was  transmitted  to  our  "Western  Con- 
tienent,  and  has  worked  itself  out  into  two  Amer- 
icas, very  distinct  if  not  opposite,  Latin  and  Anglo- 
Saxon,  whose  reconciliation  still  belongs  to  the  fu- 
ture. And  particularly  our  city  has  shown  in  its 
history  this  same  original  European  cleavage  which 
I  felt  on  my  arrival  here  during  the  last  year  of  the 
Civil  War.  At  first  I  sided  culturally  with  the 
Latin  or  Romanic  trend,  as  already  indicated,  seiz- 
ing the  opportunity,  here  presented,  of  appropriat- 
ing a  little  first-hand  knowledge  of  one  of  History's 


50     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

greatest  achievements,  namely,  that  unique  Medi- 
terranean civilization,  mother  of  our  higher  spirit- 
ual disciplines. 

But  I  gradually  developed  out  of  this  Romanic 
stage,  which  after  the  Civil  "War  kept  getting  paler 
and  weaker  both  in  me  and  in  the  community, 
whereby  the  latter  showed  a  strange  parallelism  to 
what  was  going  on  over  in  Europe.  When  France, 
that  is,  Louis  Napoleon's  France,  was  peremptorily 
ordered  to  quit  Mexico  by  Seward,  the  counter- 
stroke  was  not  unf  elt  in  French  St.  Louis,  as  I  could 
hear  in  the  loud  conversation  over  cognac  and 
black  coffee  at  M.  Combe 's.  The  Teutonic  spirit  was 
already  overwhelming  me  both  in  my  studies  and  in 
my  external  relations.  I  was  getting  deeply  ab- 
sorbed in  the  philosophic  movement,  and  especially 
in  the  all-encompassing  system  of  Hegel,  now  my 
mind's  grand  objective.  From  the  French  cuisine 
wreathed  round  with  multitudinous  causerie,  I 
changed  to  a  large  German  boarding-house  of 
boundless  babblement  over  Bier  and  Wurst.  The 
classic  song  of  La  Belle  France  seemed  to  be  getting 
drowned  in  the  roar  of  Deutschland  uber  Alles.  I 
joined  a  German  Social  Club  of  young  folks  where 
English  was  unheard,  and  I  took  part  in  music, 
dance,  games,  festivals,  not  refusing  the  fluids  as 
a  part  of  the  new  learning.  The  German  theater  I 
cultivated,  especially  when  Goethe  and  Schiller 
were  on  the  boards.  One  Sunday  evening  I  dared 
think  it  my  duty  instead  of  attending  Church,  to  go 
to  see  Faust — my  first  opportunity  to  witness  the 


FROM  ROMANIC  TO  TEUTONIC.  51 

masterpiece  of  Teutonic  Literature.  The  house  was 
packed  with  the  very  folk,  the  applause  uprose 
uproarious,  the  general  feeling  swayed  to  and  fro 
triumphant,  the  whole  play  being  interspersed  with 
shouts  and  German  catchwords,  most  of  which  I 
could  not  understand.  But  the  loudest,  most  pro- 
longed, most  suggestive  acclamation  I  did  under- 
stand, since  it  swelled  forth  at  the  burst  of  laugh- 
ing hell-fire  from  the  mouth  of  ironic  Mephistoph- 
eles  as  he  ironicises  the  Church,  scoffing  out  the  pas- 
sage: 

Die  Kirche  hat  einen  guten  Magen. 

The  actor  who  spoke  the  lines  did  his  infernal 
best,  for  he  became  the  Devil  then  and  there  in 
speech  and  in  look.  And  that  audience  after  him 
seemed  to  undergo  a  similar  diabolic  transforma- 
tion, which  lasted  some  minutes.  Thus  I  caught  a 
glimpse  of  one  phase  of  Teutonia's  soul  that  night, 
which  has  never  quit  me,  but  which  has  come  back 
to  me  more  vividly  than  ever  during  these  past 
four  years,  along  with  their  prodigious  problems 
interrogating  me:  Is  Germany  then  Mephistoph- 
eles?  Has  the  greatest  German  poet,  embodying 
the  greatest  German  legend,  simply  drawn  the  por- 
trait of  his  own  people  in  their  final  catastrophe? 
For  we  may  well  recall  now  the  tragic  end  of  Meph- 
istopheles,  making  the  poet's  Faust  a  Teutonic 
world-tragedy. 

But  let  us  return  to  our  retrospect.  In  my  zeal 
I  quit  the  center  of  the  city  and  went  to  live  in  the 


52     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST.     . 

residence  quarter  where  I  might  experience  Ger- 
man domestic  life,  which  had  such  a  beautiful  and 
naive  expression  of  itself  in  poetry  and  music.  The 
outcome  could  not  be  avoided:  I  wound  up  this 
part  of  my  Germanization  by  a  German  marriage 
and  started  on  a  new  phase  of  my  career. 

Thus  I  made  the  complete  transition  from  the 
Romanic  to  the  Teutonic  in  my  life's  discipline. 
And  I  must  not  fail  to  add  that  this  transition  was 
not  merely  mine,  but  the  city's,  the  time's,  aye  the 
world's  even;  for  was  not  all  civilization  German- 
izing quite  down  to  the  fate-year  of  1914  ?  And  all 
education  from  the  little  Kindergarden  up  to  the 
great  University — was  it  not  largely  based  upon 
German  pedagogy  ?  So  I  look  back  and  behold  my 
wee  self  pre-enacting  as  a  St.  Louis  atom  a  stage 
of  the  World's  History. 

VI 

The  Great  St.  Louis  Deed 

During  these  years  a  larger  hope  took  hold  of 
St.  Louis,  a  greater  civic  pride,  a  more  colossal  ur- 
ban egotism  than  she  has  ever  known  since.  Can 
we  trace  this  consciousness  of  her  own  importance 
to  its  source?  She  seems  to  have  felt  at  this  time 
a  world-historical  destiny,  and  claimed  a  lofty  na- 
tional if  not  a  supra-national  mission.  Had  she 
really  done  anything  which  might  serve  as  a  ground 
or  even  as  a  pretext  for  this  far-reaching  aspira- 
tion?   So  we  ask  now  in  retrospect  with  some  in- 


THE  GREAT  ST.  L0UI8  DEED.  53 

sistent  importunity.  Such  a  deed  of  hers  can  be 
pointed  out  and  studied  which  was  not  merely  a 
local  or  temporary  incident,  but  an  exploit  of  uni- 
versal significance. 

I  am  aware  that  I  shall  call  up  strong  protest  and 
perhaps  ridicule  at  the  meaning  which  I  give  to  the 
affair  of  Camp  Jackson.  But  as  I  view  the  matter, 
it  was  a  great  pivotal  event  whose  purport  time  has 
not  only  confirmed,  but  has  continued  to  deepen. 
To-day  I  think  to  note  our  microscopic  Camp  Jack- 
son enlarged  over  the  sea  into  Europe  which  is  fight- 
ing its  hitherto  separative  tendency  toward  some 
kind  of  federated  Union. 

A  little  less  than  three  years  after  the  taking  of 
Camp  Jackson,  I  sprang  out  of  a  railroad  train 
which  had  brought  me  from  Cincinnati,  and  push- 
ing to  the  banks  of  the  Mississippi  near-by,  I  caught 
my  first  view  of  St.  Louis  as  she  lay  wrapped  in 
her  flowing  sable  headdress  of  smoke.  Not  very  at- 
tractive in  outer  look  did  she  appear  to  me  from 
that  distance;  still  even  then  she,  like  the  veiled 
Egyptian  image  at  Sais,  was  secretly  propounding 
to  me  the  problem  of  my  earthly  existence,  which  I 
am  working  at  still  to-day  under  her  cloudy  coif 
after  more  than  half  a  century. 

As  I  crossed  the  river  on  the  ferry-boat,  and  first 
trudged  the  wharf  toward  the  streets,  I  asked  my- 
self:  "What  is  the  event,  which  most  deeply  and 
persistently  lurks  in  your  memory  concerning  this 
spot  of  earth?    Is  there  any  significant  deed  here 


54     THE  ST.  L0VI8  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

done  in  the  past,  whose  presence  haunts  and  colors 
all  your  eager  sight-seeing  ? ' ' 

My  answer  was,  "Yes,  this  for  me  is  the  city  of 
Camp  Jackson." 

In  order  that  I  may  impart  to  my  reader  as  viv- 
idly as  I  can  the  reason  for  this  peculiar  mental 
state  of  mine,  let  me  put  briefly  together  the  chief 
national  events  of  that  time : 

(1)  The  Union  had  been  broken  to  pieces  under 
Buchanan  by  the  secession  of  the  Southern  tier  of 
Slave  States. 

(2)  Lincoln,  the  new  President,  had  affirmed  as 
the  essential  point  of  his  Inaugural  (March  4th, 
1861)  the  Primacy  of  the  Union. 

(3)  South  Carolina  had  maintained  not  only  in 
word  but  also  in  deed  the  Primacy  of  the  Single 
State  by  the  capture  of  Fort  Sumter  (April  14th). 

(4)  Lincoln  had  answered  her  with  his  resolve  in 
his  call  for  75,000  volunteers,  to  put  down  the  re- 
bellion (April  15th). 

(5)  Camp  Jackson,  taken  (May  10th,  1861)  in 
less  than  a  month  after  the  fall  of  Sumter,  was  the 
Great  Deed,  the  earliest  victorious  response  of  the 
Nation  affirming  by  its  action  the  Primacy  of  the 
Union,  and  thus  sealing  Lincoln's  first  call  with  its 
first  real  achievement. 

All  these  steps  of  the  resistless  onstriding  crisis 
of  the  time  I  had  followed  with  the  intense  inner 
reaction  of  a  young  fellow  of  twenty  at  College.  On 
the  whole  the  stream  of  events  dashed  madly  to- 
ward disunion  in  spite  of  the  attempts  to  stay  its 


THE  GREAT  ST.  LOUIS  DEED.  55 

furious  energy.  Soul-crushing  had  been  my  dis- 
may, and  that  of  the  North  generally  at  the  spec- 
tacle of  the  huge  falling  edifice  of  our  country.  But 
when  I  woke  one  fine  May  morning  and  in  my  Ohio 
home  read  the  newspaper  head-lines  about  the  cap- 
ture of  Camp  Jackson  at  St.  Louis,  I  felt  that  the 
first  decisive  counterstroke  had  been  given  to  the 
advance  of  the  rebellion.  In  a  slave  State,  in  the 
South 's  largest  city,  by  the  act  of  its  own  people 
secession  had  been  arrested  and  whelmed  back  in 
a  stunning  defeat.  I  felt  this  already  in  my  little 
town  to  be  the  overture  to  the  Union's  victory,  and 
it  swept  away  the  cloud  of  despair  which  had  hung 
over  the  North  since  the  fall  of  Fort  Sumter.  And 
that  has  remained  the  place  of  Camp  Jackson  in 
the  movement  of  the  whole  Civil  War — the  primal 
'counterstroke  of  successful  resistance  to  the  hith- 
erto quite  unimpeded  sweep  of  the  South 's  triumph. 
And  the  saving  act  took  place  at  the  center  of  the 
Great  Valley  and  of  its  River,  as  it  were  in  the 
heart  of  the  Nation,  which  was  now  really  tapped 
to  its  core,  henceforth  to  gush  out  lavishly  in  de- 
fense of  its  existence. 

Thus  I  first  trod  the  streets  of  St.  Louis  with  no 
little  reminiscence  and  patriotic  elation,  probably 
not  so  very  far  from  Laclede's  first  cabin  built 
here  about  one  hundred  years  before  my  arrival. 
But  that  atomic  event,  though  pregnant  with  a 
great  future,  I  hardly  knew  and  could  not  then 
think  much  about.  St.  Louis  at  the  moment  was 
still  in  the  poignant  pulsations    of    the    conflict, 


56     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

though  it  was  no  longer  the  immediate  prize  of 
combat.  The  fact  is  this  city  had  made  more  and 
greater  history  during  the  earlier  stages  of  the 
"War  than  any  other  city  of  the  country,  not  except- 
ing Washington.  Really  St.  Louis  was  more  impor- 
tant then  than  it  has  ever  been  since.  It  had  for  a 
while  more  than  a  local,  more  than  a  national,  yea 
a  world-historical  eminence.  That  first  testful  fight 
for  Federal  Union  not  merely  of  the  American 
States  but  (as  we  just  now  are  beginning  to  see)  of 
the  World  took  place  on  this  spot,  a  typical  deed 
hereafter  to  be  repeated  thousandfold  in  our  his- 
tory, and  it  has  hardly  yet  begun  repeating  itself 
around  the  globe.  The  Great  River  too  was  to  be 
freed  as  well  as  its  Valley,  which  crowning  feat' 
was  accomplished  by  gunboats  constructed  and  sent 
from  this  point.  Such  was  then  our  sovereign  lead 
in  the  West,  perchance  in  the  Nation ;  will  it  spur' 
us  to  renewed  activity  to  keep  our  inning,  or  para- 
lyze us  with  the  great  illusion  of  our  irreversible' 
supremacy?  In  this  success  lurks  the  danger  in- 
herent in  all  victory. 

Utterly  contradictory  and  long-continued  has 
been  the  disputation  concerning  Camp  Jackson. 
Opinions  about  it  locked  horns  at  the  time,  and 
have  remained  locked  up  to  date.  A  few  years  ago, 
its  semi-centennial  took  place,  and  the  whole  sub-, 
ject  was  thrashed  over  in  the  newspapers  with 
pretty  much  the  same  diversity  of  judgment  as  in. 
its  beginning.  The  deed  can  be  shown  to  be  both 
legal  and  illegal  on  both  sides,  according  as  the  law! 


THE  GREAT  ST.  LOUIS  DEED.  57 

of  the  Union  or  the  law  of  the  Single-State  is 
deemed  paramount.  In  fact  that  problem  was  just 
what  the  law  could  not  solve,  so  that  some  power  or 
energy  seems  intervening  above  the  fighting  dual- 
ism of  the  two  legalities.  What  is  that  higher 
Power?  Or  the  argument  often  drops  the  legal  as- 
pect, and  dwells  on  the  policy  or  the  expediency  of 
the  deed.  But  again  each  side  shows  with  equal 
force  that  its  part  in  the  Camp  Jackson  affair  was 
very  expedient,  but  very  inexpedient  was  the  other 
side's  part.  Thus  some  greater  might  seems  to  be 
using  both  the  expedient  and  the  inexpedient  for 
its  own  purpose.  Can  I  in  any  manner  see  or  get 
hold  of  that  supernal  energy  which  sways  above  all 
contradictions;  especially  the  one  called  up  by 
Camp  Jackson?  For  here  are  seen  grappling  a 
right  which  is  illegal  and  a  wrong  which  is  legal — 
which  side  can  the  honest  but  perplexed  path-seek- 
ing citizen  take? 

Apart  from  the  disunionists,  I  found  the  union- 
ists still  deeply  divided  about  the  justification  of 
Camp  Jackson.  The  thing  puzzled  me.  I  needed 
but  to  blow  off  the  ashes  with  a  word,  when  I  could 
not  only  see  but  feel  the  first  fires  of  the  contro- 
versy still  glowing  hot  in  the  hearts  of  the  two  op- 
posing sides,  after  three  years  of  cooling  off.  I  lis- 
tened to  both  parties  with  eagerness,  yea  with  sym- 
pathy, and  finally  came  to  the  conclusion  that  the 
supreme  upper  purpose  of  Camp  Jackson  was  just 
this  division  into  the  two  different  sorts  of  union- 
ists, the  conditional  and  the  unconditional  (so  they 


58     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

were  often  named  at  the  time),  as  the  grand  pre- 
liminary discipline  not  only  for  saving  but  for  re- 
generating the  Union. 

I  had  been  before  this  experience  boisterously 
but  one-sidedly  interested  in  the  deed  of  Camp 
Jackson  at  a  distance,  as  if  it  trumpeted  the  first 
preluding  note  of  triumph  over  the  Nation's  disso- 
lution. But  the  discords  of  the  two  clashing  parts 
which  lurked  in  the  victory,  I  now  heard  on  the 
spot  of  their  origin,  and  their  historic  collision 
rose  seething  murkily  within  me.  "Where,  how  can 
I  get  the  light?  This  was  one  of  the  spiritual 
troubles  that  drove  me  later  to  interrogate  more 
profoundly  that  hitherto  enigmatic  oracle  called 
Philosophy. 

But  if  Camp  Jackson  was  to  me  a  kind  of  un- 
sung Iliad  with  heroic  deed,  I  soon  came  to  ask, 
Who  was  the  hero  f  I  had  not  far  to  look,  in  fact 
he  rose  in  evidence  everywhere,  the  visible  presence 
in  each  part  or  phase  of  the  one  great  action.  And 
whatever  salient  turn  I  might  look  at,  there  stood 
the  one  heroic  individual,  the  spirit's  sovereign 
permeating  and  directing  each  particle  of  the  total 
event. 

Here  it  is  worth  while  to  contrast  the  deeds  of 
Port  Sumter  and  Camp  Jackson,  less  than  a  month 
apart  at  the  beginning  of  the  Civil  War,  and  prefig- 
uring its  two  tendencies.  The  Fort  is  assaulted 
and  taken  by  the  Secessionists;  thus  they  succeed 
so  far  in  disrupting  the  Union,  and  the  United 
States  troops  withdraw  to  the  North.    A  foreshow 


THE  GREAT  ST.  LOUIS  DEED.  59 

is  this  of  what  takes  place  in  the  East  during  the 
whole  war.  Northern  troops  on  Southern  soil  get 
whipped,  but  they  in  turn  overcome  the  South  if  it 
invades  the  North. 

Now  behold  the  West.  Here  the  Union  seizes 
the  offensive  on  the  moment,  and  practically  keeps 
it  from  the  very  start  to  the  finish.  This  start  is 
Camp  Jackson,  which  is  the  first  really  positive  re- 
sponse to  the  President's  call,  hence  the  import  of 
it  and  the  thrill.  The  "West  saw  its  ideal  and  its 
hope  at  stake  in  both  deeds,  being  enormously  de- 
pressed by  Fort  Sumter  but  proportionately  up- 
lifted by  Camp  Jackson,  which  was  our  true  initia- 
tive, the  War's  prophetic  challenge. 

The  greatest  man  in  the  nation  then  was  Francis 
Preston  Blair,  if  not  in  the  world ;  he  stood  and  di- 
rected for  some  days  a  world-historical  act ;  Univer- 
sal History  pivoted  for  a  moment  on  St.  Louis  and 
on  him.  He  possessed  the  supernal  power  at  that 
moment;  his  will  coincided  with  the  World-Spirit's 
will — and  thus  he  became  its  historic  executor,  its 
Hero.  Will  he  ever  be  able  to  repeat  that  one  su- 
premacy? If  so,  he  is  the  coming  man  of  the  Na- 
tion's supreme  crisis.  Or  is  he  only  a  single-deed 
Great  Man,  mighty  for  the  once,  and  then  declining 
toward  sunset?  Let  us  scan  him  more  closely  to 
read  his  lesson. 


60     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

VII 

The  St.  Louis  Hero 

Quite  a  little  spell  after  the  Camp  Jackson  event, 
say  some  nine  or  ten  years,  which  permitted  us  the 
calm  to  survey  it  not  merely  in  its  political  but 
also  in  its  literary  aspect,  I  remember  discussing 
with  my  friend  Judge  Woerner  this  problem: 
Which  is  the  best  artistic  vehicle  for  expressing  the 
deed  of  Camp  Jackson,  the  Novel  or  the  Epic?  Sev- 
eral hours  we  kept  turning  the  matter  over  while  he 
interjected  many  vivid  personal  recollections  from 
his  experience,  for  he  was  under  arms  that  day  on 
the  Union  side,  if  I  recall  his  statement  aright. 
Moreover  he  was  a  born  novel-reader,  which  I  was 
not ;  hence  he  seized  and  described  the  whole  action 
from  the  novelistic  point  of  view.  I,  however,  fresh 
from  the  study  of  Homer,  and  taking  my  choice 
probably  in  accord  with  some  natural  tendency, 
preferred  the  form  of  the  Epic,  with  its  sway  of  the 
Upper  Powers  in  one  shape  or  other,  as  the  most 
adequate  literary  expression  of  the  Great  Deed, 
and  capable  of  being  made  superior  to  any  purely 
historic  record  of  the  same.  So  I  reeled  him  off  a 
little  rhapsody  of  the  St.  Louis  Iliad  as  I  called  it, 
with  its  central  hero  Achilles  not  sulking,  but  di- 
vinely acting  under  the  guidance  of  Pallas  Athena 
in  person. 

The  excellent  Judge  shot  back  at  me  his  decision  : 
' '  That  may  do  for  old  Troy  and  the  Homeric  age  in 
which  you  live  too  intently ;  but  it  will  not  answer 


THE  ST.  LOUIS  HERO.  61 

for  St.  Louis  and  our  piesent  time,  whose  art-form 
I  tell  you,  is  the  Novel  and  not  your  antiquated 
Epic.  Better  quit  your  poetizing  any  how,  it  is  left 
behind  in  our  new  world."  So  my  friend  was  in- 
clined to  challenge  not  only  my  opinion  but  my 
right  of  poetic  utterance,  and  he  was  not  alone  in 
his  view.  Whereupon  I  replied:  "My  God-sent 
office  calls  for  my  true  self-expression  in  whatever 
form  of  it  the  spirit  imposes  upon  my  tongue ;  you 
may  not  like  it,  nor  anybody  else ;  still  I  must  and 
shall  fulfil  my  soul's  prime  vocation." 

So  much  for  an  old  personal  problem  pertaining 
to  the  limits  of  my  writing-gift,  a  problem  still  pro- 
voked afresh  and  still  unriddled.  With  this  very 
modern  episode  ended,  let  us  turn  back  to  our  St. 
Louis  Iliad,  and  consider  its  hero  at  his  highest 
moment. 

As  I  look  yonder  at  him  through  all  the  inter- 
vening decades,  Blair  appears  before  me  now  as  a 
great  heroic  personality  standing  at  a  supreme 
turning-point  of  the  World's  History,  and  direct- 
ing its  coming  destiny.  What  was  the  ultimate 
stake  of  his  preternational  activity,  doubtless  un- 
conscious to  himself  ?  Just  here  in  St.  Louis  at  that 
moment  the  problem  had  come  up  in  all  its  far- 
reaching  intensity :  Shall  this  city,  this  State,  this 
Valley,  and  therewith  this  Nation  advance  to  a  new 
and  stronger  and  freer  Federal  Union  or  lapse  back- 
ward into  the  separated  and  everrasping  States  of 
Europe,  which  have  still  this  problem  to  settle  in 
the  future?     (They  are  trying  with  many  sour 


62     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST 

faces  and  painful  contortions  to  settle  it  just  now). 
Or  was  the  soldier  Lyon  the  foremost  man  of  des- 
tiny? It  seems  to  me  that  anybody  who  carefully 
reads  the  fate-burdened  events  of  those  overflowing 
hours  will  soon  see  that  the  military  man  was 
merely  the  smiting  weapon  in  the  hands  of  Blair, 
who  really  first  forged  it  and  then  directed  it  to  the 
supreme  end. 

So  I  can  vision  Francis  Preston  Blair  on  this 
spot  seizing  hold  of  the  rudder  of  the  World's  His- 
tory and  giving  to  the  same  a  quick  significant 
whirl  at  a  grand  turn  in  the  stream  of  time.  That 
was  his  sudden  call  and  inspiration,  more  visible 
at  the  present  moment  than  ever  before.  I  do  not 
claim  that  I  beheld  his  lofty  historic  position  then, 
as  I  walked  up  Olive  street  to  the  site  of  Camp 
Jackson,  but  I  did  feel  the  original  demonic  power 
of  the  man  in  that  occurrence,  the  cosmical  energy, 
if  you  wish  to  call  it  such,  which  took  possession 
of  him  and  made  him  perform  things  which  appear 
to  ordinary  life  superhuman,  and  which  to  the  eye 
of  the  old  Greek  poet  are  the  deeds  of  the  Hero  in- 
spired by  the  Olympian  Gods.  Hence  to  me  Camp 
Jackson  has  unfolded  in  time  an  epical  character, 
modern  though  it  be. 

But  I  have  to  add  that  Blair  owned  this  peculiar 
power  but  the  once,  and  then  for  a  short  time ;  he 
lost  the  gift  largely  if  not  entirely  in  later  days ;  he 
was  chosen  just  the  one  time  by  the  Spirit  of  the 
Age  to  execute  its  supernal  behest.  After  the  one 
grand  culminant  effort,  his  career  droops,  though 


THE  ST.  LOUIS  HERO.  63 

not  uneventful.  As  the  greatest  man  at  that  time 
in  St.  Louis,  as  a  kind  of  epical  hero  in  a  supreme 
national  deed,  I  followed  him  and  listened  to  his 
spoken  word,  though  he  was,  when  I  heard  him,  in 
comparative  eclipse. 

Blair  was  the  man  who  saw  distinctly,  and  acted 
upon  the  insight,  that  the  fight  between  the  two  sec- 
tional antagonisms  must  be  made ;  he  had  thus  read 
the  decree  of  the  time,  or  if  you  will,  the  behest  of 
the  World-Spirit.  "Give  us  always  the  man  who 
can  do  that,"  is  the  cry  of  every  crisis.  Blair  had 
been  preparing  the  instrumentality  for  some  years. 
In  a  slave  state  he  organized  an  emancipation  party 
— the  natives  and  the  foreigners,  the  latter  being 
Germans  chiefly — first  as  political  clubs,  the  so- 
called  Wide- A  wakes,  throughout  the  city.  But  the 
other  side  began  to  do  likewise  and  rallied  their 
Minute  Men,  for  the  open  original  secessionists  in- 
tended disunion,  and  the  secret  ones  too. 

But  Blair  knew  his  advantages ;  his  people  were 
largely  trained  soldiers  of  Europe  and  supplied 
with  officers;  he  realized  that  we  had  a  standing 
army  in  our  midst,  ready  to  be  mobilized  on  notice. 
These  men  he  immediately  offered  to  Lincoln  in 
response  to  the  President's  first  call,  and  they  were 
at  once  mustered  in  by  Lyon.  But  after  Camp 
Jackson  he  somehow  could  not  control  his  own 
forces,  could  no  longer  direct  the  power  which  he 
had  evoked.  Accordingly  he  brought  Fremont, 
who  would  utilize  this  same  power,  and  who,  having 
got  it,  kept  it  away  from  Blair,  and  then  lost  it  in 


64     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

his  turn.  Thus  Fremont  failed  utterly,  and  so  it 
came  that  the  Germans  were  without  any  adequate 
American  leader.  Then  they  practically  took  pos- 
session of  the  City  and  the  State  in  their  own  right. 
So  the  matter  stood  when  I  arrived  in  1864. 

Blair  was  a  friend  of  Brockmeyer,  to  whom  he 
did  a  great  service  in  rescuing  the  latter  from  the 
clutches  of  arbitrary  military  power,  which  had 
thrust  him  in  jail.  But  a  great  disservice  it  was, 
in  my  opinion,  when  Blair  persuaded  him  to  enter 
Missouri  politics.  That  was  the  philosopher's  aber- 
ration from  the  path  of  his  true  destiny  as  I  fore- 
cast him;  his  genius  at  its  best  was  not  political. 
Thus  Blair,  though  never  a  member,  had  an  indi- 
rect influence  upon  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  indeed 
he  fated  it,  and  Brockmeyer  with  it,  though  far 
from  purposing  any  such  result. 

I  have  stated  above  that  Blair  trained  and  used 
Lyon  as  his  deft  military  instrument,  quite  indis- 
pensable ;  but  the  general  must  have  soldiers  disci- 
plined, enthusiastic,  ready  to  leap  to  the  battle-line 
at  the  word  of  command.  Now  the  curious  fact 
springs  up  that  Blair  in  a  time  of  peace  had  found 
a  standing  army  already  drilled  and  officered, 
though  scattered,  which  he  brought  together  and 
organized,  putting  it  under  the  authority  of  Lyon 
along  with  himself.  This  far-reaching,  little  recog- 
nized, but  prolific  fact  must  be  set  forth,  not  in  its 
historic  fullness,  but  so  far  as  it  had  a  bearing  upon 
our  St.  Louis  Movement  and  the  members  thereof, 
not  omitting  of  course  my  little  autobiographic  self. 


THE  STANDING  ARMY  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  65 

VIII 

The  Standing  Army  of  St.  Louis 

The  significance  of  this  Camp  Jackson  army  along 
with  its  deed  and  its  hero  cannot  be  left  out  of  the 
St.  Louis  Movement,  which  never  could  have  arisen 
unless  through  such  an  antecedent  condition.  And 
St.  Louis  certainly  would  have  become  a  different 
city  without  this  deeply  determining  experience. 
And  Missouri  probably  would  have  followed  Vir- 
ginia and  met  a  similar  fate,  had  it  not  been  for 
Blair  and  his  Germans,  who  at  once  enforced  by 
means  of  Camp  Jackson  the  unconditional  line  be- 
tween Union  and  Disunion.  The  conflict  could  not 
be  compromised  any  longer,  even  here  in  the  birth- 
state  of  the  old  Compromise  of  1820.  Sterling  Price, 
Virginia-born,  best  represents  the  conditional  com- 
promising Unionist  who  must  be  now  fully  union- 
ized or  disunionized,  or,  as  we  can  see  and  say  to- 
day, must  be  Americanized  or  Europeanized,  for 
the  hour  has  struck.  Blair,  also  of  Virginia  de- 
scent by  way  of  Kentucky,  is  Price's  antitype  and 
the  right  destroyer  of  his  idea.  Thus  here  in  Mis- 
souri, Mother  Virginia  out  of  the  creative  depths 
of  her  dual  nature  has  brought  forth  two  sets  of 
desperately  conflicting  sons  and  their  antagonistic 
principles  in  the  Nation  represented  by  Abraham 
Lincoln  and  Jefferson  Davis,  both  also  of  Southern 
descent  through  Kentucky. 

Let  us  now  look  at  the  other  element,  unknown 
to  Virginia — the  German — but  the  prime  physical 


QQ     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

condition  of  victory,  Thor's  hammer  swung  on  high 
in  triumph.  There  was  a  time  when  St.  Louis 
might  well  be  called  a  German  city — a  period  of 
some  dozen  or  fifteen  years,  as  I  reckon  its  dura- 
tion. Germany  seemed  to  have  migrated  hither  in 
person,  and  to  have  settled  down  in  St.  Louis  and 
the  surrounding  country  on  both  sides  of  the  Mis- 
sissippi. Thousands  upon  thousands  they  came 
flocking  not  only  with  their  laborious  bodies,  but 
with  their  whole  intellectual  outfit,  from  the  man 
trained  at  the  university  down  to  the  common- 
schooled  peasant.  It  was  the  second  great  migra- 
tion of  Teutonia  to  the  United  States,  the  first  be- 
ing that  earlier  hegira  chiefly  to  Pennsylvania, 
which  took  place  in  the  English  colonial  times.  The 
start  of  this  second  vast  swarming  of  the  Teutonic 
folk  over  the  ocean  has  been  dated  in  1818  by  na- 
tive historians;  the  European  political  troubles 
gave  to  it  increased  momentum  in  the  early  Thir- 
ties, and  especially  in  1848.  Thus  a  little  German 
world  arose  here  in  the  "West  with  St.  Louis  at  its 
heart. 

But  the  point  which  I  wish  now  to  emphasize 
once  more  in  this  connection  is  that  nearly  all  these 
Germans  were  trained  soldiers  of  the  old  Father- 
land, and  could  at  once  step  from  the  plow  into  the 
disciplined  order  of  battle.  And  what  is  more 
strange,  they  had  here  their  own  officers  already 
schooled  in  the  best  military  institutes  of  Europe. 
That  is,  without  knowing  it  the  city  had  in  its 
midst  a  standing  army  ready  for  immediate  service. 


THE  STANDING  ARMY  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  67 

An  instance  reported  to  me  by  the  son  of  one  of 
these  German  officers  will  illustrate.  ' '  My  father, ' ' 
says  this  son,  "was  an  educated  military  engineer 
in  Germany,  but  fled  to  America,  since  he  had  par- 
ticipated in  the  revolution  of  1848.  He  was  build- 
ing a  large  structure  in  North  St.  Louis  under  a 
contract  with  a  hundred  men  or  more  in  charge, 
when  on  an  April  day  of  1861  appeared  before  him 
his  old  friend  and  fellow-officer,  Franz  Sigel,  then 
only  a  little  school-teacher  in  the  city,  who  said  to 
him  'Come,  we  must  enlist.'  'What  do  you  mean?' 
Sigel  replied,  'Lincoln  has  called  for  troops,  we 
must  take  up  our  old  profession. '  '  But  what  am  I 
to  do  with  this  building  and  these  men?'  'Your 
house  will  not  at  present  be  needed;  but  who  are 
these  workmen?'  'Germans — laborers,  artisans, 
foremen.'  'Soldiers,  I  see,'  said  Sigel ;  'bring  them 
along.'  So  at  once  a  German-drilled  army  sprang 
into  ranks  with  its  complete  organization,  and  the 
next  day  was  getting  in  line  for  duty. ' ' 

Now  Blair  had  already  seen  this  hidden  weapon, 
and  was  utilizing  it  for  his  purpose.  He  had  begun 
to  employ  it  in  1858,  when  he  was  elected  Republi- 
can representative,  the  only  one  from  a  Slave  State, 
chiefly  through  German  votes.  But  in  1860  he  had 
organized  the  before-mentioned  Lincoln  Wide- 
Awakes  into  semi-military  companies  as  political 
clubs,  upon  which  he  still  kept  his  hand  after  the 
election.  For  Blair  had  already  foreseen  the  ap- 
proaching Civil  War,  and  knew  that  it  could  not 
longer  be  shirked  or  compromised  away.     Upon 


68     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

this  conviction  he  acted,  and  so  he  kept  getting  his 
standing-army  in  order,  waiting  for  the  fateful  min- 
ute to  strike.  Such  was  his  timely  foresight,  which 
spurred  him  to  his  military  preparation,  and  made 
him  the  doer  of  the  time's  Great  Deed. 

One  might  think,  many  did  think,  that  the  mili- 
tary leader  of  the  coming  War  had  appeared  in  this 
Camp  Jackson  exploit.  No,  that  was  Blair's  one 
supreme  exploit,  as  already  said;  from  that  mo- 
ment began  his  star's  obscuration.  Though  he  was 
still  active,  the  Genius  of  the  Time  refused  to  stamp 
his  work  with  its  sovereign  seal.  And  after  him  no 
great  general  receives  at  once  the  baptism  of  vic- 
tory ;  all  who  are  tried  do  not  stand  the  test.  But 
when  years  have  passed,  two  leaders  rise  winning 
the  crown  of  triumph — Grant  and  Sherman,  both 
of  whom  were  present  in  St.  Louis  as  citizens  and 
spectators  on  Camp  Jackson  day.  One  queries  why 
were  not  they  in  the  midst  of  this  opening  fight? 
Both  have  given  reasons  in  their  Memoirs;  rather 
hipshot  appears  each  excuse  to  me.  The  fact  seems 
to  be  that  they  were  still  terribly  in  doubt,  both 
had  Southern  connections,  though  both  were  born 
in  the  North.  Let  me  dare  supply  their  new  inner 
resolution  as  they  meditatively  turned  homeward 
from  the  scene:  "Yes,  Camp  Jackson  here  under 
my  eyes  has  stirred  my  blood  as  Fort  Sumter  off 
yonder  never  did.  I  must  go  and  enlist  as  soon  as 
I  can  find  my  place."  Within  a  few  months  both 
of  them,  having  gotten  out  of  St.  Louis,  were  made 
Colonels  in  the  Union  Army,  one  of  volunteers,  the 


THE  STANDING  ARMY  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  (59 

other  of  regulars.  After  the  same  manner  Camp 
Jackson  compelled  thousands  to  resolve  for  one  side 
or  the  other. 

So  much  for  the  great  Americans  of  our  city  at 
this  time.  There  is  no  doubt,  however,  that  St. 
Louis  during  those  years  took  a  deeper  and  longer 
dip  into  the  German  folk-soul,  than  any  other  city 
in  the  United  States,  or  any  perhaps  outside  of 
Germany  itself.  There  was  a  general  tendency  to 
fall  into  Teutonic  life,  to  adopt  its  arts,  customs, 
and  ways  of  thinking.  To  be  sure  there  were  those 
who  held  aloof,  especially  after  the  Civil  War.  But 
I  with  the  majority  received  baptism  in  this  Ger- 
man ocean,  which  then  overflowed  our  city,  leaving 
an  ever  memorable  impress  upon  it  and  me  and 
especially  upon  our  St.  Louis  Movement. 


CHAPTER  SECOND 

Illusion  and  Disillusion 

Strangely  parallel  with  these  same  years  rises 
what  I  shall  call  the  Great  Illusion  of  St.  Louis, 
which  runs  its  course  till  the  counterstroke  of  Dis- 
illusion falls  upon  us  with  a  stunning  blastment  of 
hope.  Thus  we  went  through  an  historical  experi- 
ence of  the  deepest  import,  giving  us  a  discipline 
which  is  world-wide  at  this  moment.  Have  not  the 
nations  of  the  Earth  just  been  witnessing  the  great 
Teutonic  Illusion  of  universal  domination  through 
war,  followed  now  by  what  promises  to  be  a  much 
greater  and  longer  Disillusion  ?  St.  Louis  dreaming 
itself  the  world's  coming  metropolis  to  be  won  in 
peace,  experienced  a  somewhat  similar  dispensation, 
passing  from  the  Illusion  of  her  sovereignty  in 
wealth,  power  and  population  to  complete  Disillu- 
sion through  the  pitiless  antagonism  of  the  fact. 

In  the  preceding  Chapter  I  nave  sought  to  give 
some  notion  of  the  time's  doings  at  St.  Louis,  espe- 
cially as  connected  with  the  St.  Louis  Movement 
and  with  myself,  this  little  atom  of  autobiography. 
Remarkable  energy,  a  unique  cultural  outburst, 
unbounded  aspiration  of  individuals  along  with 
grandiose  civic  ambition  were  felt  throbbing  up- 
wards throughout  the  community.  At  least  such 
was  my  ever-bubbling  hope  responsive,  as  I  remem- 

70 


ILLUSION  AND  DISILLUSION.  71 

ber  well,  to  that  of  the  city.  And  now  we  are  to 
catch  the  deeper  undertone  of  these  occurrences, 
the  ironic  play  in  them  raid  trough  them  which 
weaves  in  its  illusory  web  the  whole  population, 
the  common  folk  as  well  as  the  philosophers.  We 
are  lured  to  believe,  by  the  magic  of  our  own  im- 
aginations, a  persistent  phantasmal  lie — the  lie  of 
material  glory  and  supremacy.  The  time  for  us 
becomes  one  huge  mendacity  to  which  St.  Louis 
surrenders  herself  soul  and  body  till  she  quite  he- 
comes  that  which  she  believes,  when,  undeceived 
by  a  sudden  blow  of  fate,  she  ente/s  upon  a  long 
purgatorial  penance.  Such  is  my  construction  of 
the  cardinal  epoch  in  our  city's  history,  through 
which  I  myself  passed,  and  of  which  I  was  a  part 
— not  a  large  yet  an  organic  constituent. 

Can  I  now  reeonstrue  the  phenomenon,  as  I  look 
back  at  it  with  sharpened  interest  (by  the  events 
of  to-day),  and  with  revivified  memory?  The  irony 
of  all  existence  was  lurking  in  us,  building  our  fan- 
tastic Babylon.  Our  faith  in  what  we  were  going 
to  get  divinely  gratis  had  no  bounds,  its  rainbow 
treachery  was  enticing  us  blindly  on  to  be  present 
at  the  approaching  triumph  of  the  Future  Great 
City  of  the  World — which  designation  of  us  be- 
came axiomatic  in  every  mouth  on  every  street  cor- 
ner. But  the  Gods  intended  something  very  dif- 
ferent for  us,  in  fulfilment  of  their  own  ends— we 
being  necessarily  but  a  part  of  their  total  cosmos- 
drama.  Me  personally  the  time  was  driving  to 
master   all    appearance,    which   had   indeed   over- 


72     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

wrought  and  possessed  my  world-view  just  by- 
dangling  before  me  its  false  hopes,  whose  Illusion 
I  was  to  pierce  and  undo  by  that  system  of  thought 
whose  purpose  aimed  to  reach  true  being  just 
through  the  self-negation  of  the  lie.  This  was  the 
chief  merit  of  Hegel,  and  herein  our  Philosophical 
Society  had  its  call  from  the  time. 

The  grand  problem  of  the  World's  Illusion  was 
then  strongly  exemplified  in  St.  Louis,  and  in  me, 
and  apparently  in  everybody  else  about  us.  It  was 
a  situation  well  known  and  characterized  by  the 
Great  Books  of  all  ages,  the  Bibles  of  the  Race. 
Old  Homer  has  shown  it  very  strikingly  in  the  lying 
dream  of  the  Greek  Leader  Agamemnon,  sent  from 
above  by  the  supreme  Olympian  God  Zeus  upon  the 
mortal  below,  who  "on  that  very  day  thought  to 
take  the  city  of  Priam."  So  St,  Louis  and  all  its 
people  dreamed  of  capturing  the  American  Troy 
of  untold  riches  and  numbers;  we  kept  for  years, 
like  fatuous  Agamemnon,  "musing  on  things  that 
never  were  to  be."  And  the  bitter  exclamation  of 
the  poet  when  he  stresses  the  divine  irony  would 
apply  to  us:  "Fool!  who  little  knew  what  Zeus 
designed ! ' ' 

A  personal  memento  I  may  be  permitted  to  add 
at  this  point.  In  1880  while  the  Illusion  was  still 
upon  us,  I  was  teaching  classes  in  the  Iliad,  and 
unfolded  to  my  little  St.  Louis  constitutency  the 
foregoing  view  of  Agamemnon's  lying  dream,  with 
illustrations  from  life  and  history.  But  I  did  not 
then  know  that  we  there,  all  of  us,  teacher  and 


ILLUSION  AND  DISILLUSION.  73 

pupils,  as  well  as  the  entire  community,  were  like- 
wise the  victims  of  an  Illusion  similar  to  that  of 
the  Greek  Leader,  over  whose  comedy  we  were  in- 
clined to  have  some  genteel  merriment.  But  really 
we  were  laughing  at  ourselves,  and  did  not  know  it, 
though  our  Disillusion  was  already  on  its  way  and 
would  soon  arrive,  in  fact  did  arrive  later  during 
that  same  year.  In  the  words  of  the  old  poet  we 
too  were  "fools  who  little  knew  what  Zeus  de- 
signed," all  of  us  being  unconsciously  then  and 
there  a  living  contemporary  illustration  of  Hom- 
er's picture  limned  some  2500  years  ago.  And 
thus  we  are  still  realizing  our  old  poet-prophet, 
wherein  is  found  his  best  commentary. 

So  much  for  the  antique  Greek  Bible,  with  a 
modern  application  to  modern  St.  Louis,  though 
the  book  be  not  of  the  usually  accepted  biblical 
canon.  But  there  is  the  other  Scripture,  the  au- 
thorized, which  also  grapples  with  the  same  prob- 
lem. For  it  is  Hebrew  St.  Paul  who  declares: 
"God  shall  send  them  strong  delusion  that  they 
should  believe  a  lie" — a  theology  not  so  very  un- 
like that  of  Greek  Agamemnon's  lying  dream  sent 
of  Zeus.  The  apostle  states  also  the  purpose  of 
this  divine  missive:  "That  they  all  might  be 
damned  who  believed  not,"  this  unbelief  or  wrong 
belief  being  the  sin  which  calls  forth  the  penalty. 

Thus  we,  even  in  our  literary  classes,  were  led 
to  grapple  with  the  testful  problem  of  human  Illu- 
sion, as  manifested  not  only  in  individuals  but  also 
in  cities  and  nations.     It  had  become  the  prime 


74     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

psychologic  fact  of  the  St.  Louis  soul-world,  and  I 
believe  that  we  were  sympathetically  drawn  by  our 
communal  instinct  to  these  deeper  studies  of  Litera- 
ture, whose  secret  push  must  have  lain  in  the  time. 
Hence  it  belongs  to  the  history  of  our  St.  Louis 
Movement  that  it  give  some  account  of  this  peculiar 
phenomenon,  which  affected  us  all,  and  helped  to 
give  tendency  and  even  character  to  our  future 
achievement. 

Yet  I  must  not  fail  to  mention  the  fact  that  in 
the  very  might  of  our  Illusion  lurked  the  back- 
stroke of  its  unreality,  of  its  falsity.  A  lie  can 
hardly  help  giving  some  dim  intimation  of  itself, 
even  in  the  innocent  soul  who  may  believe  it.  So  I 
now  construe  that  uncanny  feeling  which  gripped 
us  all  at  the  mere  mention  of  the  name  of  Chicago, 
which  had  already  become  not  only  our  rival,  but 
our  secret  antipathy,  nay,  our  ever-increasing  ter- 
ror. Somehow  our  people  forefelt  it  the  coming 
spell-breaker,  the  remorseless  smasher  of  our  Great 
Illusion,  and  we  tingled  with  a  spasm  of  jealousy 
which  doubtless  varied  much  with  individuals.  Of 
our  own  set,  Brockmeyer  could  on  small  provoca- 
tion fall  into  profane  if  not  obscene  anti-Chicago 
paroxysms.  Harris  did  not  care  much,  for  I  doubt 
if  he  ever  intended  to  stay  in  our  St.  Louis;  he 
planned  from  the  beginning  to  return  to  his  ideal 
Yankeeland,  which  was  more  like  and  of  Chicago 
than  St.  Louis.  As  for  myself  I  was  pretty  badly 
poisoned  at  first,  but  I  grew  better  when  I  began 
fully   to   recognize  the  will  of   the  Gods.     This 


ILLUSION  AND  DISILLUSION.  75 

recognition  advanced  very  slowly  at  the  start,  and 
with  frequent  backslidings,  till  Illusion  was  wiped 
out  in  my  brain  by  the  one  grand  stroke  of  Dis- 
illusion. Complete  restoration  from  interurban  an- 
tipathy took  place  later  through  my  long  residence 
in  Chicago,  though  I  never  got  over  my  early  at- 
tachment for  even  illusive  St.  Louis;  I  have  re- 
mained ingrown  with  its  Movement,  and  am  now 
devoting  a  good  shred  of  my  senescence  to  writing 
its  story. 

The  common  epithet  applied  by  our  good  people 
here  was  "bad  town ;"  even  our  saintly  newspapers 
would  cry  out  in  horror,  "wicked  Chicago!"  A 
searching  test  of  our  hearts  was  offered  by  the 
great  Chicago  fire  of  1870.  Of  course  we  with 
some  public  display  sent  money  for  the  homeless 
and  provisions  for  the  hungry,  and  even  resolutions 
of  sympathy  for  the  unfortunate  city — all  of  which 
was  of  right  appearance ;  but  privately  everywhere 
could  be  heard  without  unhappy  tears  the  pious 
scriptural  ejaculation:  "Again  the  fire  of  heaven 
has  fallen  upon  Sodom  and  Gomorrah ;  may  it  com- 
plete its  divinely  appointed  work ! ' ' 

Still  such  was  not  to  be  Chicago's  fate,  as  we  all 
see  now.  On  the  other  hand,  St.  Louis  in  this  way 
was  proclaiming  her  own  unconscious  Illusion  of 
supremacy  to  be  under  supernal  protection,  which, 
if  need  be,  would  help  her  out  by  arson.  Let  us 
now  give  a  little  study  to  that  Illusion  which  deeply 
insinuated  itself  into  the  St.  Louis  Movement  as 
well  as  into  every  wee  urban  molecule,  not  except- 
ing me. 


76     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 


The  Great  St.  Louis  Illusion 

St.  Louis  has  a  soul  of  her  own,  and  has  had  from 
the  time  when  I  began  to  get  acquainted  with  her 
— a  unique  civic  Psyche,  amenable  only  to  the  laws 
of  Psychology.  Toward  me  she  stands  in  the  rela- 
tion of  a  Person  who  has  gone  through  many 
changes  since  I  have  known  her,  that  is,  during 
more  than  fifty  years.  Her  life  is  associated  with 
mine  in  a  greater  or  less  intimacy,  and  has  often 
determined  it  to  a  new  turn  of  its  labyrinthine 
errantry. 

Hence  the  biography  of  Dame  St.  Louis  will  in- 
terweave itself  into  the  present  account  at  numer- 
ous points,  and  some  picture  or  presentment  of  her 
character,  at  least  as  I  construe  it  from  my  own 
considerable  experience,  will  rise  out  of  the  fre- 
quent pencillings  along  these  pages.  Justly  do  we 
call  our  theme  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  for  this 
could  not  have  taken  place  anywhere  else  in  Amer- 
ica, perhaps  not  anywhere  on  the  globe,  save  in  that 
peculiar  communal  conglomerate  named  St.  Louis. 
Moreover  even  here  the  foregoing  event  could  not 
have  happened  except  at  a  given  time,  at  the  right 
psychological  moment,  into  which  the  Fates  of  Life 
plunged  me,  without  my  knowing  why  or  my  having 
ever  found  out — which  news  of  my  original  self  I 
may  expect  when  I  step  across. 

So  much  by  way  of  preface  to  a  cardinal  state- 
ment :  this  city-soul,  as  I  may  call  it,  was  getting  to 


THE  GREAT  ST.  LOUIS  ILLUSION.  77 

have  one  all-dominating  psychical  trait  when  I  first 
breathed  of  its  atmosphere,  which  trait  I  soon 
caught,  and  then  it  caught  me.  I  quickly  found  the 
one  faith  universal,  that  St.  Louis  could  not  help 
becoming  the  largest,  richest,  most  influential  city 
in  the  land,  with  all  the  gain  and  glory  and  domin- 
ion resulting  from  such  pre-eminence.  In  religion, 
politics,  and  love  its  multiracial  polyglottic  people 
might  differ,  but  in  one  creed  they  were  united,  or 
rather  fused  to  a  kind  of  fanaticism:  the  doctrine 
of  the  future  supremacy  of  St.  Louis. 

Of  course  I  soon  found  myself  a  convert,  and  a 
very  zealous  one,  if  not  quite  purblind,  and  ready 
to  do  battle  for  my  new  conviction.  Still  further, 
I  became  warmly  attached  to  the  community  un- 
der whose  banner  I  had  enlisted  as  a  fighter,  and 
with  whose  changes  of  fortune  I  rose  and  fell  in 
my  deepest  heart-throbs.  To  this  time  and  its  test- 
ful  experience  I  attribute  my  life-long  underlying 
predilection  for  St.  Louis  in  spite  of  many  hurtful 
counter-strokes.  If  she  slapped  me  out  of  her  pres- 
ence, I  would  in  the  course  of  years  sneak  back  at 
least  for  a  look.  Take  this  example :  after  many  an 
angry  separation,  here  I  am  once  more  in  her  lap 
writing  the  present  book  on  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment, which  writ  I  believe,  after  all  the  deductions 
which  I  with  my  frankest  pen  intend  to  make,  man- 
ifold and  searching,  will  be  found  to  her  credit. 

Looking  backward  through  the  long  trial  of  the 
years  we  can  see  that  such  a  prediction  or  antici- 
pation  of   her   all-overtopping   pre-eminence    has 


78     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

never  been  fulfilled,  that  it  was  in  fact  a  huge  mi- 
rage floating  before  the  vision  of  a  great  population 
across  the  empty  desert  of  the  future.  So  the  inter- 
esting question  in  folk-psychology  pushes  up  with 
no  little  importunity  in  the  mind :  What  pre-dis- 
posed  the  St.  Louis  soul  to  such  a  phantasm  ?  Even 
more  vehement  is  the  interrogation  with  me  at 
least:  What  were  the  effects  of  this  prolonged 
communal  self-deception  upon  the  city  itself  and 
especially  upon  the  St.  Louis  Movement?  For  we 
all  lay  under  that  spell  of  enchantment  for  years, 
veritably  a  kind  of  civic  megalomania,  from  which 
the  levelest  heads  were  not  exempt — not  even  the 
solidest  mind  in  the  city,  and  the  greatest  mechan- 
ical genius  of  the  country,  if  not  of  the  world — I 
mean  the  river-spanning  bridge-builder  James  B. 
Eads.  On  the  opposite  side  of  the  mental  scale  we 
philosophers,  supposed  to  be  addicted  to  topsy- 
turvy idealism  by  nature  and  by  training,  and  oth- 
erwise deemed  not  well-balanced  of  brain,  took  up 
with  the  glorious  phantasmagory  of  our  town's 
coming  greatness,  and  philosophized  it  into  a  vast 
city  ruled  by  philosophers,  somewhat  after  the 
model  of  that  ancient  Neo-Platonic  polity  called 
Platonopolis.  Our  President  Brockmeyer,  whose 
easy-soaring  imagination  with  a  little  goading 
could  outstrip  his  philosophy,  gave  us  many  a  far- 
flashing  display  of  his  fancy's  fireworks,  which  we 
tyros  believed  to  be  the  very  truth  of  the  new  reve- 
lation, our  modern  Apocalypse  of  St.  Louis.  If  a 
doubter  from  some  Eastern  State  or  from  Chicago 


THE  GREAT  ST.  LOUIS  ILLUSION.  79 

should  wag  his  tongue  or  even  shake  his  head  in 
question,  there  would  at  once  burst  up  a  violent 
eruption  which  would  not  only  blaze  white-hot  but 
smell  sulphurous  with  wrathful  energy. 

Such  was  to  me  the  grand  psychical  phenomenon 
of  St.  Louis,  pervasive,  all-coercing,  allowing  no 
interrogation  of  its  validity,  certainly  not  when  at 
its  highest  overflow.  I  remember  my  own  discus- 
sions of  the  subject  with  skeptical  outsiders ;  noth- 
ing could  make  me  flare  up  internally  sooner  than 
the  scoffing  word  of  the  belittler  or  even  the  quiet 
argument  of  the  opposer.  I  shared  completely,  I 
may  say  devoutly,  in  this  faith  of  the  city's  own 
soul  as  it  went  on  dreaming  of  its  multifarious 
grandeurs  never  to  be  realized. 

Hence  with  some  emphasis  I  jot  down  here  in  my 
life 's  narrative  The  Great  St.  Louis  Illusion,  which 
spell-bound  me  and  the  city,  as  I  remember  the  mat- 
ter, in  a  sort  of  dream-world  for  a  goodly  number 
of  years.  To  be  sure  on  all  other  affairs  we  were 
sane  enough,  but  on  the  one  topic  we  would  fly  off 
into  a  lying  dream.  How  many  years  did  it  last? 
As  I  recall  the  time  and  its  craze  of  caprices,  the 
Illusion  began  to  show  itself  shortly  after  the  close 
of  the  Civil  War,  and  must  have  maintained  its 
tyranny  for  some  twelve  or  fifteen  years.  Un- 
doubtedly it  started  to  wane  after  its  first  full  efful- 
gence, but  the  spell  was  not  completely  broken  till 
the  census  of  1880  smote  the  somnolescent  city  with 
the  awakening  thunder-words:  population  of  St. 
Louis  350,000 ;  of  Chicago,  503,000. 


80     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

I  can  still  see  the  old  lady  jump  up  from  her 
sleep  at  the  bodeful  figures,  and  challenge  the  cor- 
rectness of  the  Washington  enumeration,  with  no 
little  wrath,  though  with  an  undershiver  of  anxiety. 
Not  so  easily  would  she  renounce  her  long  sweet 
Illusion;  so  she  resolved  to  take  her  own  census. 
The  best  mathematician  of  her  University  was 
called  upon  to  oversee  accurately  the  arithmetic  of 
the  thing,  and  to  insert  all  the  omitted  names,  of 
which  a  number  had  been  dug  up  in  the  slums  and 
elsewhere.  The  result,  however,  was  a  practical 
confirmation  of  the  first  dream-destroying  figures. 
Then  followed  a  corresponding  overflow  of  Disillu- 
sion and  of  general  dismay,  at  first  running  toward 
despair.  The  outside  world  and  Chicago  especially 
failed  not  to  enjoy  what  they  regarded  as  the  de- 
noument  of  a  great  civic  comedy,  funning  and  be- 
mocking  the  disenchantment  of  the  badly  fooled 
victim  at  the  end  of  the  play. 

As  for  me,  the  original  charm  had  been  shaken 
by  my  absence  from  its  direct  influence  when  I  took 
my  trip  abroad  in  1877.  In  fact,  I  had  already 
started  unconsciously  to  question  the  Illusion  be- 
fore my  departure,  and  felt  quite  willing  to  leave 
it  behind  for  awhile.  By  1880  I  had  indeed  re- 
turned to  St.  Louis,  but  had  won  meantime  a  great 
new  experience  which  had  brought  its  inner  and 
outer  changes.  I  was  now  sufficiently  aloof  to  be  a 
spectator  as  well  as  a  participant  when  the  city- 
soul  with  no  little  tossing  of  itself  had  to  undergo 
its  grand  Disillusion.    I  sympathized,  but  I  laughed 


THE  GREAT  ST.  LOUIS  ILLUSION.  81 

too  at  the  rather  sudden  dissipation  of  that  dream- 
life  of  the  past  which  had  been  also  mine  own. 

In  its  humiliated  mood  the  town  began  to  look 
backward  and  to  trace  the  source  of  deception. 
Those  tell-tale  figures  of  the  census  showed  that  it 
had  been  outstripped  for  years  in  the  grand  race 
for  the  urban  primacy  of  the  West.  The  confes- 
sion had  to  be  made :  Yes,  already  in  1870  our 
rival  Chicago  must  have  surpassed  us  in  popula- 
tion, though  the  census  of  that  year  had  made  St. 
Louis  the  larger  by  some  15,000.  But  can  it  be 
possible  ?  Where  is  this  thing  going  to  end  ?  The 
newspapers  start  quickly  on  the  scent  with  a  pro- 
digious outcry  all  over  the  country:  a  national 
fraud  has  been  committed ;  the  Great  St.  Louis  Illu- 
sion has  had  the  power  somehow  to  transform  the 
United  States  Census  Bureau  into  the  image  of 
itself,  turning  the  same  to  the  Great  Illusion  of  a 
Census,  the  whole  of  which  begins  to  look  insub- 
stantial. But  in  1880  the  trick  is  uncovered,  and 
there  follows  a  long  penitential  era  with  heart's 
sorrow  and  confession,  and  with  an  access  of  de- 
spairful lethargy.  One  estimate  now  before  me 
places  these  illusory  inhabitants  of  St.  Louis  in 
1870  at  not  less  than  100,000,  a  ghostly  multitude 
who  were  duly  counted  for  our  city  but  had  never 
lived  here  or  anywhere  else.  Such  we  may  deem 
the  supreme  tricksy  act  of  the  Great  St.  Louis  Illu- 
sion: it  threatens  to  transform  the  nation,  if  not 
the  whole  world  into  a  phantasm  like  unto  itself. 
But  mark  the  fateful  consequence!    Thus  the  city 


82     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

is  lured  to  believe  its  own  lie,  manufactured  by 
itself  and  imposed  upon  itself,  and  the  Great  Illu- 
sion wins  ten  years  more  of  life,  till  the  next  Census. 
Dare  we  here  try  to  conceive  for  a  moment  what 
might  otherwise  have  happened,  in  the  interest  of 
eternal  verity?  If  our  community  had  only  ac- 
cepted the  truth  of  itself,  whose  oracle  was  not 
hard  to  find  just  across  the  River,  and  if  it  had  set 
its  house  in  order  and  had  lived  according  to  its  own 
reality  it  might  have  been  a  different  St.  Louis 
with  its  city-soul  still  here  in  full  energy  at  the 
center  of  a  continent.  But  can  the  leopard  change 
his  spots  ?  So  in  a  kind  of  defiant  megalomania  our 
urban  folk  is  destined  to  gorge  itself  a  decade 
longer  upon  the  very  vanity  of  existence,  upon  its 
own  self-made  Illusion. 

II 

The  Prophet  of  the  Illusion 

As  usual,  this  peculiar  public  consciousness  had 
its  most  prominent  individual  representative  and 
expositor,  who  was  not  only  a  fervent  believer  but 
a  genuine  apostle,  offering  himself  a  living  sacrifice 
to  the  cause.  He  was  the  embodiment  of  that  St. 
Louis  Epoch,  and  made  himself  the  voice  of  the 
whole  community's  highest  faith  and  aspiration.  I 
can  still  see  him  hobbling,  puffing,  indoctrinating 
whomsoever  he  could  get  to  listen,  while  mopping 
the  ever  gushing  perspiration  from  his  brow  with 
a  soppy  bandanna  which  had  already  gone  through 


THE  PROPHET  OF  THE  ILLUSION.  83 

many  a  similar  campaign.  I  shall  have  to  confess 
that  I,  looking  back  through  the  long  avenue  of  the 
years,  behold  him  now  rising  up  before  me  as  the 
typical  urban  character  of  that  time,  its  truest  rep- 
resentative even  in  his  distortions,  physical  and 
mental.  After  no  little  contemplation  of  his  career, 
of  his  writings,  and  of  his  intellectual  outfit,  he  has 
grown  upon  me  more  and  more  as  the  best  visible 
incarnation  of  the  St.  Louis  city-soul  during  this 
era  of  the  Great  Illusion. 

Hence  I  am  going  to  celebrate  him  to  the  extent 
of  my  talent  in  a  brief  biography,  for  which  I  find 
the  printed  materials  to  be  very  scanty,  though  I 
have  made  some  search  for  them  in  the  place  where 
they  ought  to  be  found.  During  these  years  he 
was  the  most  prominent  and  best-known  figure  on 
the  streets  of  St.  Louis,  though  I  deem  it  now  my 
ill-luck  that  I  formed  no  intimate  personal  ac- 
quaintance with  the  man  and  did  not  get  to  know 
him  and  see  him  directly  in  his  work.  For  I  do  not 
deny  that  this  my  present  review  of  his  life  with  its 
adversities  has  roused  in  me  a  deep,  strong  fellow- 
feeling;  in  his  career  I  can  trace  not  a  few  lines 
similar  to  mine ;  his  fate  I  gaze  upon  with  sympa- 
thy and  catch  a  strange  reflection  of  mine  own, 
though  there  were  between  us  considerable  differ- 
ences. To  take  an  example  of  the  latter,  his  writ 
had  an  infinite  publicity  compared  to  anything  I 
ever  sent  forth.  He  vanished  first  from  our  street- 
corners  and  then  from  the  world  some  thirty  years 
ago;  his  unique  personality  has  passed  into  the 


84     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

tomb  of  forgetfulness,  and  his  books  seem  also 
marching  rapidly  thitherward.  But  I  have  not  yet 
told  his  name.  Old  citizens,  rubbing  the  dust  off 
their  memories,  may  still  recall,  probably  with  a 
titter  of  contempt,  the  form  and  fame  of  Logan 
Uriah  Reavis. 

I  designated  him  the  prophet  of  the  Great  St. 
Louis  Illusion,  because  he  had  one  presaging 
thought  in  his  life,  in  his  books,  and  even  in  his 
looks;  this  thought  he  formulated  in  the  locution: 
St.  Louis  the  Future  Great  City  of  the  World. 
That  was  his  preaching  and  writing  text,  the  main 
title  of  his  various  works,  his  soul's  inmost  faith, 
uttered  with  the  fervor  and  conviction  of  old 
prophecy.  Alas  !  after  his  unwearied  self-imposed 
apostolate  of  some  fifteen  years,  he  had  to  live 
through  the  pitiless  disenchantment  of  the  census 
of  1880,  which  seems  to  have  struck  him  dumb  (as 
it  did  many  another  St.  Louisan),  for  his  prophetic 
vocation  became  silent  under  that  awful  stroke, 
though  he  is  said  in  secret  to  have  still  clung  to  his 
old  faith. 

Reavis  was  born  1831  in  the  Sangamon  Bottom, 
not  far  from  the  famous  Lincoln  localities  of  Illi- 
nois. For  a  time  he  was  a  newspaper  man  at  little 
Beardstown,  but  in  1866  he  pushed  on  to  great  St. 
Louis,  with  his  prophetic  Illusion  now  in  posses- 
sion of  him,  or  let  it  be  called  an  obsession.  He 
started  his  gospel  in  1867  with  a  pamphlet  entitled 
The  New  Republic,  which  is  already  attuned  to 
grandiose  prediction.     But  in  1869    he   published 


THE  PROPHET  OF  THE  ILLUSION.  85 

his  Removal  of  the  Capital,  which  he  forecast  was 
to  be  transferred  from  Washington  to  St.  Louis. 
This  book,  in  which  he  advocated  the  removal  of 
the  seat  of  the  National  Government,  was  composed 
in  the  topmost  effervescence  of  the  Great  Illusion, 
and  met  with  no  small  response  in  the  city,  but  with 
jeers  and  cat-calls  from  all  along  the  Atlantic 
Coast,  and  of  course  from  Chicago.  Still  the  work 
won  for  Reavis  his  Herculean  title  throughout  the 
nation  as  the  colossal  Capital-mover,  and  he  be- 
came one  of  our  chief  celebrities. 

Let  it  here  be  noted  by  way  of  connection  with 
our  present  work,  that  Reavis  with  his  prophetic 
idea  appeared  among  us  quite  co-eval  with  the 
birth  of  the  Philosophical  Society  already  re- 
counted. Only  a  few  months  apart  in  the  same 
year  of  1866  came  the  two  rather  noiseless,  but 
ominous  arrivals.  Were  they  in  some  secret  way 
related — both  being  perchance  the  offspring  of  the 
same  hidden  demonic  Power  now  at  work  in  the 
city-soul  of  St.  Louis?  Reavis  was  not  a  member 
of  the  philosophic  set,  I  never  saw  him  at  any  of 
our  meetings,  though  I  have  heard  that  he  did  once 
attend  a  lecture  by  Harris  on  the  Immortality  of 
the  Soul,  which  I  read  afterwards,  and  for  me  it 
was  just  the  abstrusest  prelection  I  ever  tried  to 
fathom  on  that  abstruse  subject.  I  wonder  what 
Reavis  got  out  of  it.  From  his  writings  I  infer 
that  he  had  no  irrepressible  hankering  after  Phi- 
losophy, especially  after  that  of  Hegel. 

Skeptically  to-day  we  are  inclined  to  query :  Did 


86     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

the  solid  business-heads  of  our  town  really  support 
this  fantastic  scheme  of  the  Capital's  removal?  A 
committee  of  leading  citizens  headed  by  James  B. 
Eads,  our  practical  master-mind,  gave  their  un- 
stinted approval  in  writing.  The  County  Court 
voted  a  handsome  appropriation  for  the  free  distri- 
bution of  his  pamphlet  of  1870,  which  was  printed 
both  in  English  and  German.  Reavis  claims  that 
150,000  copies  of  his  various  books  passed  into  cir- 
culation. There  is  little  doubt  that  he  voiced  the 
city's  illusive  mania  at  that  time  better  than  any 
other  man.  Edition  after  edition  was  called  for; 
he  says  that  he  printed  no  less  than  five  different 
pamphlets  on  the  one  all-absorbing  text  between 
1867  and  1870.  That  whole  text  was  written,  as  he 
declares  "to  show  the  glory  and  greatness  of  St. 
Louis,  and  of  the  Mississippi  basin ' ' ;  here  was  des- 
tined to  be  not  merely  the  national  but  "the  conti- 
nental Capital,"  "the  great  city  of  the  Future/' 
verily  the  center  of  the  world's  wealth  and  power 
and  population. 

The  chief  argument  of  Reavis  stressed  the  geo- 
graphical locality,  round  which  were  clustered  the 
abounding  resources  of  the  Great  Valley,  and  these 
he  paraded  with  much  statistical  lore.  Figures  too 
shared  in  the  Great  Illusion,  and  proved  again 
that  the  deft  magician  of  numbers  can  turn  even 
sour  mathematics  to  sweetest  dreams.  The  main 
appeal  of  Reavis  was  to  the  material  side  of  man, 
with  its  resistless  oncoming  in  triumph.  He  guaged 
his  time  and  his  audience  correctly. 


THE  PROPHET  OF  THE  ILLUSION.  87 

He  tells  pathetically  of  his  advent:  "a  stranger 
without  friends  and  without  means."  Privation 
he  had  endured:  "I  have  walked  these  streets  in 
poverty  and  hunger."  Ridicule  too  he  has  had  to 
face,  but  he  has  been  sustained  by  his  inner  faith : 
"I  have  the  promise  from  of  old  that  my  works 
shall  live  after  me."  Possibly  Harris'  lecture  on 
immortality  gave  him  this  deathless  comfort.  Here- 
in we  see  the  enthusiastic  prophet  who  believes  in 
his  call.  But  thus  he  shows  himself  as  the  Very  in- 
carnation of  his  own  Great  Illusion. 

Still  to  the  St.  Louis  people,  whose  deepest  aspi- 
ration he  embodied  and  indeed  voiced,  Reavis  was 
on  the  whole  a  comic  character.  His  Falstaffian  ap- 
pearance was  already  a  challenge  to  mirth  for  the 
street  ragmuffins.  His  long  scraggy  red  beard,  and 
the  furrowed  canals  in  his  face  never  failed  to 
catch  and  treasure  their  due  proportion  of  St.  Louis 
soot.  He  had  a  great  predilection  for  himself  when 
unkempt  and  unwashed,  not  unlike  Dame  St.  Louis 
herself.  Then  step-mother  Nature  had  left  him 
somewhat  hunchbacked  and  hipshot,  for  which  he 
was  surely  not  to  blame,  though  he  became  thereby 
a  walking  laugh.  But  chiefly  whenever  he  dared 
take  a  step  there  would  protrude  out  from  behind  an 
enormous  haunch  on  which,  the  ribald  scoffers  of 
Chicago  and  New  York  said,  he  proposed  to  heave 
the  Capitol  from  its  foundations  at  Washington 
and  trundle  it  away  to  the  West,  swimming  with  it 
across  the  Mississippi.  St.  Louis  too  laughed  at 
him,  but  therein  laughed  at  itself  as  beholding  the 


gg     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

living  body  of  its  own  Great  Illusion  in  its  visible 
deformity.  So  the  old  Athenian  demos  took  its 
pleasure  in  jeering  at  its  own  grotesque  image  held 
up  before  itself  by  that  prince  of  time's  mimics,  the 
comedian  Aristophanes. 

Now  let  it  be  understood  that  I  was  present  at 
this  comedy  of  the  Great  Illusion,  and  was  one  of 
the  loudest  laughers  at  its  unconscious  buffoonery 
and  at  my  own  latent  folly;  but  my  merriment, 
while  shaking  my  sides,  never  shook  my  faith. 
When  I  now  glance  back  at  myself,  I  see  me  and 
the  whole  town  as  unwittingly  comic  as  honest 
Reavis  himself,  who  was  more  apostolic  and  disin- 
terested than  any  of  us.  Still  we  were  all  pursu- 
ing an  end  absurd,  nugatory,  self-annulling,  hence 
the  right  theme  of  a  Cervantean  world-comedy,  of 
which  the  Don  Quixote  was  the  enthusiastic  but  fan- 
tastical idealist  L.  U.  Reavis. 

As  for  me,  I  was  drinking  down  to  intoxication 
the  great  experience  of  Illusion  and  its  significance 
in  human  lfie.  The  foe  I  was  sent  to  conquer  had 
completely  conquered  me,  but  I  did  not  know  it, 
and  great  was  my  happiness.  Personally  I  was 
stimulated  to  the  most  strenuous  stretch  of  my 
gift,  and  won  my  highest  and  most  enduring  values 
in  pursuit  of  a  golden  bubble  soon  to  burst  into 
nothingness.  It  was  a  lesson  which  I  never  after- 
wards forgot — a  divinely  planned  course  given  me 
in  the  world's  school  by  the  supreme  pedagogue 
trouncing  into  me  the  knowledge  of  what  is  illusory 
and  ephemeral,  and  driving  me  to  find  the  Eternal 


WHENCE.  89 

in  the  Passing  and  the  Past.  Unto  that  end  I  be- 
came a  writer  of  books,  starting  to  do  then  what  I 
am  doing  just  now. 

Even  at  this  late  moment  in  reminiscence  I  3n- 
joy  the  high-hearted  hope  of  that  time,  and  would 
gladly  recover  a  little  pinch  of  it  for  present  use. 
Fortune  we  dreamed  pursuing  us  like  a  passionate 
wooer,  the  Future's  full  cornucopia  was  already 
pouring  into  our  lap,  verily  St.  Louis  had  a  cinch 
on  civilization,  and  could  not  help  it  if  she  would. 
In  this  mood  we  listened  to  our  prophet  with  the 
laugh  of  faith,  and  drank  down  his  books,  slaking 
with  delight  our  thirst  at  his  ever-welling  fountain 
of  bombastic  printer's  ink.  Really  we  were  help- 
ing to  make  our  own  comedy,  and  we  played  our- 
selves a  comic  part  even  in  our  merriment  over  our 
unconsciously  humorous  spokesman,  our  grand 
hierophant  of  Illusion. 

Ill 

Whence 

The  spectator  of  life's  drama,  now  myself  peer- 
ing down  at  mine  own  drama  through  the  long  gal- 
lery of  the  revealing  years,  cannot  help  wondering 
and  interrogating:  What  could  be  the  source,  the 
antecedent  development  of  the  Great  Illusion  in  the 
folk-soul  of  our  dear  St.  Louis  ?  For  it  must  have 
been  begotten,  born,  and  reared  on  this  spot,  among 
these  people — they  furnished  the  inner  pre-concep- 


90     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

tion  or  spiritual  potentiality,  which  was  fed  to  its 
outer  huge  reality  by  the  environing  world. 

When  I  first  came  into  contact  with  the  city's 
living  peculiar  self,  I  marked  its  exceeding  belief 
in  its  own  good-luck.  The  communal  heart  wor- 
shiped at  the  shrine  of  the  old  Roman  goddess  For- 
tuna  with  a  deeper  sincerity,  aye  sanctity,  than  at 
the  altar  of  any  other  divinity,  heathen  or  chris- 
tian. Undoubtedly  the  formal  religion  of  the  va- 
rious creeds  was  duly  attended  to  as  it  ought  to 
be ;  but  the  informal  religion,  having  no  church  or 
priest  (except  Reavis),  the  deeper  well-head  of  all 
speech  and  action  was  its  world-overarching  faith 
in  its  own  triumphant  destiny.  And  it  believed 
that  it  did  not  need  seriously  to  bestir  itself;  the 
boon  would  rain  from  the  skies,  the  pure  gift  of  the 
Gods  to  their  chosen  people.  But  the  confession  has 
to  be  made  that  to-day  quite  the  opposite  character- 
istic dominates  the  city — a  deep  perilous  unfaith 
in  itself,  which  may  be  heard  in  the  ever-repeated 
question :  "What  is  the  matter  with  St.  Louis  ?  So 
every  citizen  now  turns  doctor  and  is  diagnosing  the 
grand  communal  malady,  which  somehow  refuses 
to  be  medicined  to  pristine  health  and  hope. 

This  problem,  not  merely  a  civic  but  also  a  psy- 
chologic one,  must  be  laid  over  at  present,  and  we 
shall  return  to  our  first  inquiry.  There  is  no  doubt 
that  time's  lottery  once  threw  many  precious  gifts 
into  the  lap  of  St.  Louis  without  any  special  effort 
of  her  own.  She  grew  up  the  spoilt  child  of  geo- 
graphic locality.    The  sudden  increase  in  her  trad« 


WHENCE.  91 

and  population,  and  her  central  importance  be- 
tween 1850  and  1860,  the  natural  overflow  of  the 
surging  Western  migration,  caused  her  to  outstrip 
her  only  rival  in  the  Great  Valley,  Cincinnati.  The 
Kansas  struggle  which  rose  to  be  the  chief  national 
occupation  in  the  later  fifties,  made  St.  Louis  the 
cynosure  of  the  whole  country,  located  as  she  was 
between  East  and  "West,  centered  in  the  heart  of  the 
land,  and  halving  by  her  site  the  Great  River  in  the 
middle.  This  fortunate  geographical  position 
smote  every  imagination,  but  by  its  very  excellence 
became  probably  for  St.  Louis  a  fateful  asset.  Still 
more  emphatically,  at  the  beginning  of  the  Civil 
War  she  made  herself  the  central  city  of  the  Union, 
having  done  the  first  great  positive  deed  against 
Secession,  and  having  furnished  the  first  real  mili- 
tary hero  of  the  coming  crisis,  as  already  recounted. 
The  city  lay  between  North  and  South,  and  seemed 
the  destined  spot  on  which  the  Nation's  reconcilia- 
tion was  to  take  place,  the  Union 's  best  uniter  phys- 
ically and  spiritually. 

Surely  Fortune  has  been  blindly  partial  to  St. 
Louis  during  these  years;  but  will  the  shifty 
Goddess  continue  her  smiles,  being  notoriously 
fickle  and  even  of  treacherous  Godhood  ?  Then  the 
problem  comes:  Has  she  pampered  her  favorite 
child,  hamstringing  activity  by  her  over-indul- 
gence, so  that  the  town  gets  to  thinking  that  For- 
tune will  always  take  care  of  it  without  its  co-oper- 
ation ?  As  I  remember  the  urban  psychology  about 
1870,  in  which  I  profoundly  shared,  St.  Louis  was 


92     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

inclined  to  think  that  its  greatness  could  not  be 
halted  by  anything  short  of  the  universal  cata- 
clysm, that  it  had  a  hold  on  civilization  itself,  which 
Providence  would  not,  or  could  not  break.  I  do 
not  say  that  such  a  view  was  openly  proclaimed, 
but  I  can  affirm  that  I  have  never  since  seen  so 
much  self-satisfaction  at  the  approach  of  the  ever- 
cloudy,  ever-tetering  future,  never  been  deluged  in 
such  a  Niagara  of  optimism,  civic  and  individual. 
Life  became  one  long  intoxication,  as  we  banqueted 
on  the  wine  of  the  Great  Illusion. 

To  be  sure,  there  were  ominous  signs  in  the  hori- 
zon plain  enough  to  any  eye  except  that  of  down- 
right fatuity.  Chicago  had  been  already  selected 
by  our  jealousy  as  our  menacing  challenger,  very 
boastful  but  also  very  deedful.  Still  in  those  first 
years  St.  Louis  was  as  contemptuous  of  Chicago  as 
Chicago  now  is  contemptuous  of  St.  Louis.  But  al- 
ready in  1870  the  great  line  of  migration  had  de- 
flected to  and  through  Chicago  away  from  St. 
Louis.  The  vast  North-West  was  filling  up  with 
Chicago's  dependencies,  while  brigandage  held 
sway  in  helpless  Missouri,  and  drove  the  mover's 
wagon  beyond  the  State's  boundaries,  far  into  the 
farther  West.  The  railroad,  the  new  bearer  of  civ- 
ilization, showed  a  decided  preference  for  the  more 
Northern  city,  evidently  for  good  reasons.  But 
mark  this  fact:  you  could  already  hear  every  im- 
partial observer  emphasize  the  difference  in  the 
spirit  of  the  two  places.  The  census  of  1870  showed 
a  slightly  greater  population  in  St.  Louis,  but  ac- 


WHENCE.  93 

cording  to  other  tests  she  was  lagging.  Still  as 
already  indicated,  she  had  the  magic  power  of  turn- 
ing the  Census  itself  into  a  stupendous  deception, 
into  the  very  picture  of  her  own  Great  Illusion. 
The  curse  of  that  fraud  was  that  it  took  a  decade 
longer  to  break  the  spell  of  her  enchantment. 

It  has  been  my  experience  to  watch  many  indi- 
vidual illusions  rise,  nourish,  and  break  to  nought 
in  myself  and  in  other  persons.  Crowds,  too,  I  have 
seen  driven  devilward  under  the  goad  of  some  sud- 
den phantasm,  and  more  than  once  I  have  gone 
along.  But  three  Great  Illusions  in  which  large 
communities,  in  fact  whole  peoples  have  been  the 
victims,  are  deeply  carved  on  the  memorial  tablets 
of  this  stubborn  brain  of  mine.  The  case  of  St. 
Louis  was  the  smallest  in  extent  and  in  importance 
generally,  but  for  me  altogether  the  most  impres- 
sive and  immediately  influential.  But  the  second 
Great  Illusion  of  my  time  I  lived  through  with 
heart  and  head  and  will,  deeply  engaged  in  combat- 
ing its  challenge :  this  was  the  long  and  desperate 
Illusion  of  the  Southern  people  when  they  sought 
and  fought  the  Civil  War.  I  only  speak  the  word 
of  some  of  the  best  Southerners  who,  once  partici- 
pating in  that  conflict,  with  perfect  honesty,  at 
present  call  it  an  Illusion.  But  it  has  passed  on, 
and  I  and  you  are  now  witnessing  the  third  Great 
Illusion  of  my  life's  period,  the  greatest  Illusion  of 
all  History,  veritably  earth-defying  in  its  minatory 
rage.  This  is  the  Teutonic  Illusion  of  world-domi- 
nation territorially  and  spiritually,  which  I  am  old 


94     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

enough  to  have  seen  rise,  grow  to  a  globe-girdling 
magnitude  during  half  a  century,  and  then  burst  to 
fragments  but  yesterday — November,  1918.  This 
Teutonic  Illusion  is  deeply  connected,  I  hold,  with 
a  kindred  strand  in  the  make-up  of  St.  Louis, 
whereof  something  later. 

Hence  just  now  comes  to  me  and  to  you  the  soul- 
burdening  interrogation:  What  is  the  function  of 
Illusion  not  merely  in  my  individual  history  and 
yours,  but  in  the  "World's  History?  Can  we  catch 
it,  and  put  it  under  law  and  thus  control  it  so  that 
it  will  not  the  next  time  wipe  out  our  personal  ca- 
reer and  possibly  the  whole  Earth's  hope?  To-day 
the  Great  Illusion  is  not  an  isolated  phenomenon  of 
individual,  of  city,  of  State,  of  Nation,  it  seems  to 
be  involving  in  its  spell  the  whole  globe,  and  pos- 
sibly the  Cosmos,  which  is  so  subtly  finding  its  ap- 
peal these  days. 

IV 

Some  Effects 

Causes  are  dimmer,  remoter,  and  hence  more 
doubtful ;  while  the  effects  we  may  often  see  in  our 
presence,  in  ourselves,  plain  and  fairly  describable. 
The  prime  psychical  result  of  the  Great  Illusion 
was  Hope,  limitless,  and  enormously  stimulating; 
I  was  filled  with  the  love  and  power  of  work,  and 
saw  the  shut  future  open  in  a  mirage  of  triumph. 
Given  my  mental  germ,  the  Illusion  drove  me  to 
pierce  to  the  center  of  all  this  vast  environment  of 


SOME  EFFECTS.  95 

occurrences  and  appearances;  beneath  them  I 
would  penetrate  to  the  Pure  Essences  and  by  their 
aid  organize,  that  is,  re-create  the  Universe,  at  least 
for  my  own  self-expression. 

It  so  came  about  that  I  in  this  searchful  condition 
obtained  a  book  whose  supreme  object  was  to  im- 
part me  just  the  thing  I  wanted.  My  guardian 
spirit,  I  may  suppose,  caused  to  be  put  into  my  hand 
at  the  opportune  moment  Hegel's  Logic,  which 
showed  me  all  creation  stripped  bare  of  its  superflu- 
ous clothing;  the  naked  prototypal  Thought,  as  it 
were,  before  Space  and  Time,  putting  on  its  spatial 
and  temporal  vestments ;  the  original  genetic  Demi- 
urge in  his  primordial  act  of  world-creating.  Thus 
I,  while  whelmed  overhead  into  the  Great  Illusion 
of  my  environment,  was  secretly  seeking  to  pene- 
trate to  its  universal  generative  source,  so  as  to 
know  it  and  perchance  to  master  it  at  its  birth- 
point.  The  two  threads  persisted  in  running  along 
together  through  my  present  life :  I  acted  the  Illu- 
sion or  in  it,  but  I  thought,  or  was  trying  to  think, 
the  Reality.  I  could  not  have  done  this  alone,  I 
would  have  given  up  the  quest,  unless  I  had  been 
upheld  and  fed  by  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  now 
buoyed  by  its  first  blooming  Hope. 

So  I  believe  this  city  gave  birth  to  the  Philosoph- 
ical Society  as  a  kind  of  twin  counterpart  or  neces- 
sary antithesis  to  its  Great  Illusion.  As  already 
stated,  the  two  appeared  at  about  the  same  time, 
seemingly  the  products  of  the  same  peculiar  ulti- 
mate energy.    Nature  is  at  her  last  turn  sanative  of 

I 


96     THE  ST.  L0VI8  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

her  own  disease ;  to  her  maddest  fever  she  has  the 
tendency  to  beget  the  antidote;  if  I  may  speak  in 
my  own  self-communing  lingo,  often  bitterly  neg- 
ative she  keeps  meanwhile  more  deeply  negating  her 
own  negative.  Thus  for  me  at  least  Philosophy 
had  sprouted  forth  as  secretly  remedial  of  the  gen- 
eral Illusion,  in  which  I  too  was  living  like  every- 
body else,  even  the  philosophers. 

I  may  note  some  instances  of  the  mighty  drive  of 
these  years  which  probably  manifested  itself  most 
strongly  in  Harris,  who  now  entered  upon  his  high- 
est creative  period,  say  betwen  1865  and  1880.  He 
founded  in  1866  the  Journal  of  Speculative  Philos- 
ophy, as  the  vehicle  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement.  In 
the  same  year  he  became  Superintendent  of  the 
Public  Schools,  and  by  his  annual  reports  as  well 
as  by  his  addresses  he  made  an  epoch  in  education, 
not  only  locally  but  throughout  the  Nation.  Thus 
he  wrought  with  equal  power  on  both  theoretical 
and  practical  lines.  Moreover  he  roused  and  kept 
active  the  community's  interest  in  his  work,  which 
embraced  the  entire  St.  Louis  Movement,  including 
not  only  Philosophy,  but  also  Literature  and  Art. 
He  had  private  classes  in  Hegel  and  Kant,  and  also 
in  Goethe  and  Dante.  He  interpreted  the  Sistine 
Madonna  as  well  as  the  Venus  of  Milo.  He  poured 
forth  a  copious  stream  of  articles,  lectures,  trans- 
lations. His  correspondence  was  extensive  in  vari- 
ous directions.  In  all  this  activity  he  was  spurred 
by  the  great  civic  Hope,  to  which  he  responded  by 
an  equal  ambition,  till  he  too  after  many  years  saw 


SOME  EFFECTS.  97 

through  the  Great  Illusion,  and  fled  back  to  his  na- 
tive New  England  rocks. 

With  Harris  I  was  closely  associated  all  this  time, 
and  had  my  first  and  only  personal  experience  of 
the  colossal  working-power  resident  in  one  mere 
man.  I  estimate  that  he  had  at  his  disposal  three 
times  the  labor-fund  that  I  owned,  and  he  was  able 
to  summon  it  all  in  an  emergency.  Physically  I 
seemed  a  weakling  beside  him ;  a  dumb-bell  which  I 
could  hardly  lift,  he  could  thrust  out  straight  from 
his  chest.  I  heard  a  palmist,  who  was  testing  his 
hand,  once  say  to  him:  "You  ought  to  enter  the 
prize-ring;  I  would  wager  that  with  a  month's 
training  you  could  knock  out  Mike  McCoole,"  an 
eminent  Irish  pugilist  of  those  days.  Still  he  then 
kept  his  pale  cadaverous  look,  though  he  afterwards 
grew  corpulent,  and  a  thin  reddish  layer  of  hair 
covered  his  entire  scalp,  which  soon  became  bare  ex- 
cept a  short  white  fringe  curtaining  monk-like  his 
neck. 

It  is  my  opinion,  however,  that  this  unremitting 
and  extravagant  outlay  of  power  during  these  fif- 
teen years  had  practically  exhausted  his  creative 
reserve ;  he  had  spent  his  originality,  when  perhaps 
he  ought  to  have  been  at  his  meridian.  It  seemed 
to  me  that  after  leaving  St.  Louis  in  1880,  he  always 
repeated  what  he  had  gained  at  St.  Louis,  of  course 
with  new  turns  and  applications.  He  never  recov- 
ered his  St.  Louis  creativity  either  in  pedagogy  or 
philosophy,  though  he  spoke  and  wrote  not  a  lit- 
tle, and  his  literary  style  became  less  technical,  or 


98     THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

at  least  less  bristling  with  Hegelian  categories. 
Hence  Harris  had  essentially  delivered  his  message 
between  his  thirtieth  and  forty-fifth  years,  which 
stretch  of  time  covers  the  duration  of  the  Great  St. 
Louis  Illusion,  under  whose  stress,  or  in  whose 
shadow  he  seems  to  have  achieved  his  best.  After 
he  quit  his  position  of  Superintendent,  I  often 
heard  him  complain  of  a  feeling  of  lethargy  which 
paralyzed  his  once  so  easy  and  buoyant  energy ;  he 
attributed  it  to  "  a  dumb  ague, ' '  which  he  had  con- 
tracted in  the  malaria  of  St.  Louis.  But  I  think  it 
was  simply  the  reaction  from  his  long  overtaxed 
mind  and  body.  His  way  of  working  would  have 
killed  me  in  a  year,  if  not  sooner.  If  he  was  to  de- 
liver a  lecture,  he  would  keep  deferring  it  till  the 
evening  before  it  was  due,  when  he  tasked  himself 
to  sit  up  all  night  to  write  it  out,  staying  awake  and 
nerved  tensely  to  composition  by  copious  draughts 
of  tea.  For  the  same  amount  of  literary  work,  I 
would  require  two  weeks  at  least,  slowly  putting  it 
together  out  of  pages  written  at  a  dozen  or  more 
sittings  of  two  or  three  hours  each.  So  it  came  that 
usually  in  his  productions  there  was  a  gradual  let- 
ting-down  in  the  last  half  till  the  close — just  the 
reverse  of  what  ought  to  be.  Hence  too  a  frequent 
unevenness  in  his  work,  owing  to  haste  and  lack  of 
due  revision. 

I  speak  of  these  matters  because  I  am  often  asked 
why  Harris  has  left  so  little  that  can  be  read  or 
even  found  to-day.  He  pumped  out  his  thought  in 
great  lumps  not  well  digested,  really  in  the  first  un- 


SOME  EFFECTS.  99 

finished  stage  of  composition ;  then  he  would  throw 
them  aside  or  often  print  them  without  subjecting 
them  to  a  second  or  even  a  third  redaction,  which 
they  often  sorely  needed  for  clarifying  and  for  or- 
ganizing their  disjointed  fragments.  I  often  begged 
him,  when  at  Concord  he  seemed  to  have  leisure,  to 
take  in  hand  his  multitudinous  and  far-scattered 
productions — articles,  essays,  lectures,  reports  of 
all  sorts — squeeze  out  of  them  all  the  too  frequent 
repetitions  and  superfluities,  mend  the  style  in  many 
a  dark  and  even  torn  spot,  and  then  after  such 
careful  revisions  print  one  or  even  two  volumes  of 
his  Miscellanies.  "Yes,  yes,"  he  would  answer,  "I 
am  going  to  do  that  this  very  winter  when  I  am 
buried  in  the  deep  snow  here  at  Concord";  but  he 
never  did  it,  seemingly  could  not  do  it.  Why? 
That  is  a  question  not  to  be  answered  till  the  finish. 
But  the  result  is,  we  must  be  satisfied  with  the  long 
list  of  his  writings  printed  by  the  United  States 
Bureau  of  Education;  if  we  wish  for  anything  of 
his,  we  have  to  dig  it  out  of  the  vast  cemetery  of 
dead  periodicals,  entombing  forty  years  of  his  best 
literary  activity.  And  even  that  list,  I  observe,  is 
not  complete. 

Harris  made  himself  the  voice  of  the  St.  Louis 
Movement,  through  his  Journal  of  Speculative  Phi- 
losophy, and  many  essays,  addresses,  articles,  all 
of  them  doubly  reinforced  by  his  winning  person- 
ality. But  it  must  be  confessed  by  his  friends,  that 
voice  of  his  never  rose  to  the  possession  of  a  dis- 
tinctive literary  quality,  never  won  a  permanent 


100  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

place  through  beautiful  or  original  utterance.  The 
Trenscendental  Movement  still  lives  in  the  writ  of 
Emerson,  who  took  exceeding  care  to  give  perma- 
nent form  to  his  central  compositions,  the  Essays. 
Harris  went  to  Concord  with  the  purpose  of  becom- 
ing Emerson's  successor,  so  at  least  I  have  always 
construed  his  act;  but  after  ten  years'  endeavor  he 
fell  back  into  his  old  pedagogy,  lapsed  into  the 
National  Bureau  of  Education  and  almost  quit  phi- 
losophy. Another  perplexing  omission  of  his,  as  I 
look  back  at  him  and  try  to  catch  his  spiritual  vi- 
gnette, is  his  neglect,  indeed  his  refusal  to  publish 
in  his  Journal,  when  he  had  space  and  means,  the 
original  source  and  first  inspiration  of  the  St.  Louis 
Philosophical  Society,  namely  Brockmeyer's  trans- 
lation of  Hegel's  Logic,  the  Book  of  Fate,  destined 
to  stay  unborn  in  the  unprinted  underworld  during 
the  whole  life  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement  up  to 
date.  Thus  Harris,  though  philosopher,  was  deeply 
and  essentially  the  journalist,  not  the  organizer; 
his  spiritual  unit  was  the  magazine  article,  not  the 
organic  book,  which  is  or  ought  to  be  something 
generically  other  than  a  mere  collection  of  period- 
ical writings. 

But  what  about  our  President,  the  primal  Titanic 
demiurge  of  our  Movement,  Brockmeyer?  At  first 
he  intended  to  write  out  in  books  his  world-making 
Promethean  thoughts  and  experiences ;  but  he  grad- 
ually became  neglectful  of  his  first-born  child,  that 
fated  Logic,  and  turned  away  from  philosophy  to 
politics,  in  which  he  had  already  begun  to  dabble 


SOME  EFFECTS.  101 

while  living  in  his  "Warren  County  cabin.  More- 
over it  was  on  this  political  side  that  the  Great  Illu- 
son  entered  him,  and  for  a  long  stay.  In  1870  he 
was  elected  State  Senator,  which  naturally  made 
him  dream  of  being  United  States  Senator.  This 
ambition  required  him  to  win  not  merely  St.  Louis 
but  all  Missouri,  and  the  deed  by  which  he  was  to 
capture  the  first  place  of  statesmanship  was  the 
making  of  a  new  Constitution  for  the  State.  The 
old  Drake  Constitution  was  unpopular  from  the 
start,  even  with  its  own  party ;  indeed  there  was  a 
question  if  it  had  ever  been  honestly  adopted.  Dur- 
ing several  years  I  found  him  always  thinking  and 
reading  on  Political  Philosophy,  and  ready  to  dis- 
cuss its  problems,  especially  in  regard  to  the  Mis- 
souri situation,  which  still  labored  under  its  war 
burdens.  He  won  his  first  point:  Brockmeyer 
more  than  any  other  one  man  may  be  called  the 
father  of  the  present  Missouri  Constitution,  though 
it  too  is  now  showing  signs  of  age.  Then  came  for 
him  a  new  promotion:  he  was  elected  Lieutenant 
Governor  of  the  State,  a  rather  neutral  office,  but 
it  gave  him  the  opportunity  to  be  often  chief  Execu- 
tive, owing  to  the  ill  health  of  the  aged  Governor, 
Phelps.  As  much  as  any  other  man,  perhaps  more 
than  any  other  man  of  his  party,  he  had  helped  to 
induct  the  Democratic  Party  into  power,  by  admit- 
ting to  suffrage  the  disfranchised  Confederates. 
Now  he  was  ready  to  take  the  next  step :  the  na- 
tional Senatorship.  But  it  was  grasped  by  a  re- 
turned Confederate,  and  Brockmeyer,  deeply  dis- 


102  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

illusioned,  quit  political  life,  and  fled  from  civiliza- 
tion back  to  the  Redmen  of  the  forest,  where  he 
stayed  long  and  formed  a  little  philosophical  Soci- 
ety. Once  at  Muscogee  in  the  Indian  Territory  I 
heard  him  explaining  the  deeper  philosophy  of 
deer-stalking  in  a  pow-wow  with  some  Creek  In- 
dians. They  all  seemed  to  hail  him  as  one  of  them- 
selves: "Big  Indian,  good  Indian."  And  he  looked 
it — the  massive  grimace,  the  coppery  tint,  the  wild 
eye  of  him. 

Here  we  may  ponder  the  significant  episode  that 
both  these  men,  our  leaders,  took  flight  from  the 
city  and  from  us  about  the  same  time  (1880),  the 
one  turning  eastward,  the  other  westward.  Each 
of  them  in  his  way  felt  the  stroke  of  the  Great  Dis- 
illusion, and  gave  his  own  characteristic  response. 
Our  Philosophical  Society  never  elected  other  offi- 
cers ;  indeed  it  had  not  met  for  years,  as  far  as  I 
now  recollect.  But  the  St.  Louis  Movement  con- 
tinued to  live,  and  to  make  for  itself  new  channels 
of  activity.  Not  long  before  this  time  I  ran  off  to 
Europe,  but  had  returned,  and  began  a  fresh  epoch 
of  my  own  distinctive  work.  But  this  belongs  to  a 
later  chapter. 

V 

The  Economic  Illusion 

Naturally  Mammon  played  his  diabolic  part  in 
the  Great  St.  Louis  Illusion;  visions  of  untold 
wealth  rose  and  danced  seductively  before  the 
minds  of  the  whole  population;  the  entire  Earth's 


THE  ECONOMIC  ILLUSION.  103 

treasures,  especially  material  prosperity  had  been 
decreed  her  by  the  Gods,  and  she  could  not  alter 
such  a  supernal  decree  if  she  would.  In  particular 
her  Real  Estate  was  to  become  the  most  valuable 
speck  of  dirt  on  this  terrene  globe.  Prophetic 
Reavis  had  proved  the  fact  in  his  multitudinous 
processions  of  figures,  which  like  George  "Washing- 
ton could  not  tell  a  lie. 

Accordingly  in  the  year  1868-9  I,  being  only  a 
poor  schoolmaster  with  a  growing  family  on  my 
conscience,  resolved  to  have  my  share  of  this  com- 
ing distribution  of  wealth,  which  the  city  was  cer- 
tain would  be  showered  like  rain  out  of  the  skies 
above,  and  which  everybody,  the  wholesale  mer- 
chant as  well  as  the  hod-carrier,  knew  would  soon 
begin  to  descend.  I  had  been  looking  about  and 
listening  a  good  deal,  and  I  found  the  judgment  of 
experts  nearly  unanimous  that  any  land  investment 
anywhere  in  St.  Louis  city  or  county  could  not  miss 
the  approaching  windfall,  as  it  lay  right  in  the 
path  of  the  irresistible  cyclone  of  prophetic  pros- 
perity. Accordingly  I  purchased  a  considerable 
piece  of  unimproved  property  in  what  was  then  a 
suburb,  near  the  old  Pair  Grounds.  The  tract  lay 
on  and  near  Grand  Avenue,  the  great  future  thor- 
oughfare of  the  world's  metropolis.  Alongside  of 
it  was  soon  to  be  erected  what  at  that  time  was  de- 
clared to  be  the  finest  architectural  monument  of 
the  city,  namely  a  lofty  Corinthian  column  set  in 
the  middle  of  the  road  and  known  as  the  water- 
tower,  since  it  also  served  the  utilitarian  purpose  of 


104  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

being  aqueduct  for  the  people.  Thus  I  indulged  in 
a  promising  vision  of  myself  as  a  rich  man — which 
promise  is  not  yet  fulfilled. 

Another  detail  of  the  situation  I  may  add  as  it 
belongs  to  the  Illusion.  In  the  center  of  the  tract, 
surrounded  by  high  ground  fit  for  building  pur- 
poses lay  a  large  deep  mud-hole  which  was  always 
covered  with  a  supply  of  water  since  it  had  an 
ever-flowing  spring  in  the  bottom,  so  that  it  bred 
some  little  minnows  and  furnished  a  small  crop  of 
ice  in  winter.  I  often  stood  on  the  banks  of  that 
little  lake  with  its  wavelets  rippling  in  the  wind, 
and  dreamed  of  the  palaces  which  would  rise  over 
its  depths  when  filled  up  with  the  city 's  ashes,  brick- 
bats, tincans,  and  other  rubbish — and  I  would  live 
in  one  of  those  palaces,  collecting  the  rents  of  the 
other  tenants.  All  this  magnificence  would  be 
then  in  the  very  heart  of  the  Capital  of  the  Nation, 
perchance  of  the  World. 

But  there  was  delay  year  after  year  in  the  ar- 
rival of  this  urban  greatness ;  the  mudhole  persisted 
in  staying  just  what  it  was,  a  mudhole,  with  its 
sluggish  waters  merely  laughing  in  my  face,  if  I 
filliped  into  it  a  solitary  pebble.  What  shall  I  do 
with  it?  Once  as  I  paddled  around  its  sedgy  mar- 
gent,  there  struck  me  for  the  moment  a  desperate 
idea :  I  would  build  a  hut  on  these  banks,  and,  like 
Thoreau  at  Walden  Pond,  I  would  quit  the  Great 
Illusion  with  its  civilization,  and  go  a-fishing,  mar- 
rying perchance  philosophy  to  pisciculture. 

Of  course  such  a  scheme  vanished  as  soon  as  I 


THE  ECONOMIC  ILLUSION.  105 

turned  my  face  the  other  way,  and  saw  the  same 
Great  Illusion  still  wrapping  the  spires  and  chim- 
neys and  all  the  city  in  its  grandly  magnifying  mi- 
rage of  future  splendors.  The  venture  might  have 
been  worse,  for  if  I  never  gained,  I  never  lost.  I 
had  some  cash  to  start  with,  sufficient  to  meet  the 
first  payment.  Then  I  saved  with  desperate  clutch 
from  my  spare  earnings  till  at  last  after  some 
seven  years  all  the  obligations  were  liquidated,  and 
I  was  again  a  free  man,  free  from  debt,  after  a 
septennial  servitude  far  worse  than  that  of  old 
Jacob,  who  at  least  won  his  Rachel.  But  I  had  got- 
ten on  my  hands  an  elephant,  white  they  call  it,  but 
mine  was  blue,  which  was  destined  to  stay  with  me 
quite  forty  years,  in  spite  of  many  wrenching 
struggles  to  get  rid  of  it  without  its  leaving  me  a 
beggar  in  my  old-age. 

Such  was  my  great  economic  Illusion,  the  direct 
offspring  of  the  universal  Illusion  of  the  time,  with 
which  I  had  become  twinned  in  blood-kinship.  But 
that  was  my  first  and  last  venture  in  the  treacher- 
ous quicksands  of  Real  Estate.  Land  itself  be- 
came for  me  the  most  unstable  footing  on  this  globe 
through  the  Great  Illusion.  It  was  Brockmeyer 
who  sold  me  this  property,  but  I  never  blamed  him, 
for  I  knew  that  he  was  under  the  same  illusive 
spell,  as  well  as  myself,  and  everybody  else  in  town 
for  that  matter.  So  I  took  my  own  discipline,  for 
it  was  a  trouncing  of  the  Gods  not  only  upon  my 
back,  but  also  upon  that  of  Dame  St.  Louis  for  our 
sins — truly  a  purgatorial  discipline  unto  our  per- 
fection. 


106  THE  ST.  L0VI8  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

I  had  indeed  won  my  freedom  from  the  galling 
economic  slavery  of  debt,  after  so  many  years  in 
the  galleys — for  debt  was  my  hell,  not  war.  Still 
I  was  not  yet  fully  liberated;  I  continued  to  own 
the  blue  elephant  stuck  fast  in  the  mudhole,  but  I 
could  not  dispose  of  him  at  any  price,  and  I  had  to 
furnish  him  food  in  the  shape  of  taxes.  Once  I 
thought  I  had  sold  him,  but  the  buyer  went  crazy 
and  was  put  into  a  madhouse,  and  the  huge  animal 
grew  more  voracious  than  ever  of  cash  nutriment 
in  the  form  of  special  levies  for  roads,  sewers,  pav- 
ing, and  fraud  (the  latter  being  in  one  case  the 
largest  item). 

I  tell  of  this  economic  Illusion,  for  its  conse- 
quences bore  decisively  upon  me  at  many  an  impor- 
tant turn  during  some  four  decades  of  the  most 
active  part  of  my  life.  Being  within  the  limits  of 
the  Great  Future  City,  that  soggy  piece  of  Real 
Estate  lay  on  my  economies  heavy,  helpless,  piti- 
less, refusing  to  give  back  any  value  in  money  or 
even  in  hope,  so  that  I  had  to  adjust  all  my  mind's 
fruits,  as  well  as  my  board  and  lodging  to  its  reme- 
diless poverty.  Then  it  always  kept  threatening 
me  with  some  fresh  taxation,  till  I  would  wish  it  to 
sink  down  still  deeper  in  its  mire,  to  very  Hades. 
At  last  it  became  to  my  sight  and  to  my  soul  a 
kind  of  Dead  Sea  which  I  never  liked  to  visit,  since 
it  would  bring  on  me  a  spell  of  melancholy  till  I  ran 
home  out  of  its  dismal  swampy  view.  After  my 
almost  life-long  schooling  in  disappointment,  I  was 
allowed  one  day  by  the  Powers  to  graduate  with 


THE  EAD8  BRIDGE.  107 

cheque  in  hand.  The  behavior  of  that  Real  Estate 
seemed  to  be  typical  of  the  city,  which  also  was  un- 
able to  recover  in  later  years  from  its  Great  Illu- 
sion, but  weltered  in  a  sort  of  sunken  lethargic 
mudhole  for  many  a  year. 

Thus  my  land  speculation  in  the  city  of  Illusion 
found  a  strange  yoke  fellow  in  my  philosophic  spec- 
ulation ;  indeed  the  latter  was  for  me  something  far 
more  solid  and  more  remunerative  than  St.  Louis 
Real  Estate.  Harris  had  in  an  inspired  moment 
named  his  periodical  the  Journal  of  Speculative 
Philosophy,  a  daring  venture  which,  however,  had 
its  subtle  adaptation  to  the  time  and  the  environ- 
ment, since  a  number  of  the  philosophers  were  in- 
clined to  speculate  both  financially  and  philosoph- 
ically, in  materiality  as  well  as  in  immateriality. 
Brockmeyer  was  again  our  heroic  protagonist  in 
both  directions,  our  limit-transcending  speculator 
in  the  soil  and  also  in  the  spirit.  Houses,  lots, 
mines  he  seized  and  owned,  as  well  as  ideas,  pure 
essences,  and  the  Absolute  itself. 

VI 

The  Eads  Bridge 

By  way  of  counterpart  to  the  Great  Illusion  of 
St.  Louis  during  this  time,  I  wish  to  emphasize  the 
one  Great  Reality  which  came  into  existence  just 
alongside  or  rather  inside  the  city's  phantasmal 
spell  at  its  uttermost.  This  Reality,  quite  the 
greatest  ever  enacted  at  St.  Louis  in  my  opinion 


108  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

except  Camp  Jackson,  was  the  Eads  Bridge,  rightly 
named  after  its  builder,  or  rather  its  creator.  For 
me  it  was  the  solidest,  purest,  truest  fact  of  the 
time,  to  which  fact  I  clung  almost  as  if  it  were  an 
anchor  in  an  ocean  of  froth  on  which  I  somehow 
was  floating.  When  I  saw  those  caissons,  piers, 
arches  rise  up  from  old  turbid  Mississippi,  not  only 
from  his  bed  but  from  the  rocks  many  feet  below 
his  mud,  saw  them  take  shape  and  span  the  angry 
flood,  I  said  to  myself:  There!  behold  now  God's 
Thought  creating  the  world,  even  embodied  in  one 
little  man ;  see  your  gossamer  abstractions  turning 
concrete  and  practical;  and  just  watch  your  He- 
gel 's  Logic  with  its  intricate  fine-spun  web  of  Pure 
Essences  realizing  itself  in  yonder  structure  with 
all  its  turns,  nodes,  iron  rods  and  braces.  So  I  went 
to  school  to  the  Eads  Bridge  the  whole  time  of  its 
erection,  some  seven  years,  from  1867  till  1874. 
During  these  same  years  I  was  teacher  of  various 
branches,  including  Philosophy,  in  the  St.  Louis 
High  School.  Let  me  add  that  I  did  not  attend  the 
Eads  Bridge  to  learn  engineering,  or  mathematics, 
or  the  nature  of  materials,  though  such  sciences  of 
course  made  their  necessary  contribution  to  the 
great  work.  I  sought  to  penetrate  it  as  an  expres- 
sion of  the  time  and  of  myself  uttered  by  a  mas- 
ter mind,  by  a  supreme  artificer  who  could  catch 
the  Genius  of  the  Age  and  turn  it  into  a  bridge. 
Let  me  speak  after  my  own  extravagance  which  no- 
body need  imitate :  James  B.  Eads  communed  with 
the  Great  Creator  of  the  Universe,  persuaded  Him 


THE  EADS  BRIDGE.  109 

to  drop  down  to  St.  Louis,  and  step  across  the 
River,  then  to  make  that  one  great  divine  step 
eternal  in  stone  and  iron,  symbol  and  help  of  mil- 
lions of  little  human  steps  like  mine  over  the 
stream. 

Now  I  came  to  understand  why  the  old  Romans, 
of  whom  I  as  a  College  Freshman,  had  read  in 
Livy,  made  their  bridge-builder  (Pontifex)  a  di- 
vine person  or  High  Priest  communing  with  the 
Supreme  God  Jupiter  for  a  structure  to  cross  over 
even  little  Tiber.  And  their  chief  one  in  this  busi- 
ness was  called  the  Supreme  Pontiff  (Pontifex 
maximus).  This  office  with  its  name  descended 
into  the  Christian  Church,  whose  highest  function- 
ary, as  God's  own  vicegerent  and  bridge-maker 
from  Earth  to  Heaven  for  men,  bore  the  title  of 
Supreme  Pontiff,  who  is  still  held  in  veneration  by 
many  peoples,  great  and  small,  on  our  globe.  So 
for  me  Engineer  Eads  has  become  the  Supreme 
Pontiff  of  the  Mississippi  Valley,  having  bridged 
its  huge  dividing  stream,  and  having  furnished  the 
creative  germ  or  model  of  thousands  of  other 
bridges  still  to  be  born. 

Every  Sunday  worshipful,  week  after  week,  and 
sometimes  oftener,  I  would  saunter  down  to  the 
Bridge  and  contemplate  it  in  a  sort  of  adoration 
and  with  a  soul-renewing  wonder  and  sympathy. 
Everywhere  else  in  the  city  I  could  hear  and  see 
only  the  Great  Illusion,  which  the  Bridge  with  its 
fresh,  hope-inspiring  outlook  on  the  future  might 
in  its  way  seem  to  confirm,  if  not  propagate.     In 


HO  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

fact,  the  whole  town  was  building  that  structure, 
and  took  the  same  up  into  its  life.  Chicago  ridi- 
culed the  work  and  denied  its  feasibility;  a  rival 
engineer  tried  to  supplant  it  with  his  own  scheme ; 
financiers  questioned  its  ability  to  pay  and  steam- 
boatmen  were  made  to  think  it  destructive  of  their 
craft  and  future  interests  on  the  river.  Still  the 
master  builder  pushed  ahead  through  all  obstacles, 
and  completed  the  most  monumental  arch  of 
triumph  in  the  land,  whereby  he  revealed  the 
greatest  mechanical  genius  of  his  time,  verily  the 
modern  Archimedes. 

James  B.  Eads  was  born  at  Lawrenceburg,  In- 
diana, in  1820,  on  the  banks  of  an  affluent  of  the 
Mississippi,  with  which  he  stood  in  some  deep  in- 
tuitive intimacy,  as  his  great  deeds  were  in  one 
way  or  other  connected  with  the  Great  River,  show- 
ing an  insight  into  and  a  mastery  over  the  very 
soul  of  the  Father  of  "Waters.  Eads  as  a  boy  had 
strayed  to  St.  Louis  in  1833,  and  began  at  the  bot- 
tom, starting  as  an  apple-peddler;  he  rose  to  be 
steamboat  clerk,  and  then  became  steamboat- 
builder  in  1842,  self-taught  in  mechanics,  not  a 
learned  mathematician  himself,  but  the  controller 
of  mathematicians  and  engineers,  through  his  com- 
manding creative  power.  The  war  found  him  en- 
gaged in  removing  obstructions  from  the  Missis- 
sippi, and  gave  to  him  his  first  supreme  task;  this 
was  to  relieve  the  Great  River  of  the  naval  obstruc- 
tion sprung  of  the  Southern  rebellion,  which  he 
accomplished  with  prime  success  through  his  gun- 


THE  EADS  BRIDGE.  m 

boats.  Thus  he  first  applied  to  navigation  the 
famous  dictum  of  Lincoln :  our  Mississippi  shall  not 
remain  half-slave,  half-free. 

After  the  war,  he  proceeded  to  overcome  the  sec- 
ond and  greater  separation — that  caused  by  the 
stream  itself  in  its  own  Great  Valley,  cutting  a  line 
of  division  through  the  same  quite  from  Canada  to 
the  Gulf,  and  making  the  long  rift  between  East 
and  West,  now  to  be  surmounted.  The  result  was 
the  Bridge  already  mentioned,  in  whose  construc- 
tion the  communal  spirit  of  St.  Louis  took  part, 
winning  what  may  be  called  a  pontifical  conscious- 
ness, perchance  like  that  of  hoary  Rome  of  the  eld- 
est kings.  At  any  rate  Captain  Eads  held  some 
original  kinship  with  the  spirit  of  the  stream;  it 
would  appear  that  the  Pontiff  knew  the  mighty 
River-God  personally  in  his  deepest  ultimate  char- 
acter as  well  as  in  all  his  petty  caprices  and  sinu- 
osities, his  little  eddies  as  well  as  his  vast  over- 
flows. 

Thus  Eads  built  us  the  chief  reality  of  that  other- 
wise phantasmal  epoch,  though  he  too  shared  in  the 
city's  dream  of  future  transcendency,  inasmuch  as 
his  name  stands  highest  on  the  list  of  sponsors  pub- 
lished by  prophetic  Reavis  to  float  the  latter 's 
dream-book.  Perhaps  Eads  also  needed  the  Great 
Illusion  to  spur  him  on  to  his  deed.  I  was  not  one 
of  his  personal  intimates,  though  I  often  saw  him, 
and  once  talked  with  him  somewhat;  he  had  lofty 
imagination,  his  best  expression,  however,  was  not 
by  word  but  by  grand   construction.     He  made 


112  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

speeches  clad  with  imagery,  but  more  deeply 
poetic  was  always  his  grandiose  conception,  and 
then  his  monumental  execution.  Through  his 
works  he  rose  up  before  me  as  a  kind  of  demiurge 
or  world-builder;  yet  his  look,  his  manner,  his 
voice,  even  his  dress  seemed  to  me  that  of  a  sleek 
unctuous  minister,  with  countenance  reverent  and 
reverend,  seamed  with  drooping  lines  of  humility. 
I  wondered  at  his  sacerdotal  face,  whether  or  not  it 
sprang  from  his  calling;  perhaps  it  resulted  from 
his  being  High  Priest  of  the  River  God,  a  veritable 
Supreme  Pontiff  elected  by  Nature  herself. 

One  more  duty  after  building  the  Bridge  he  had 
to  perform  for  the  Mississippi:  the  removal  of  the 
obstruction  at  its  mouth  which  was  silted  up  by  the 
deposits  of  mud.  This  work  is  known  as  his  sys- 
tem of  Jetties.  Thus  he  completes  the  liberation  of 
the  Great  River,  devoting  to  it  the  three  supreme 
actions  of  his  life,  each  of  which  may  be  deemed  a 
step  in  the  process  of  freeing  it  of  its  physical  un- 
freedoms.  So  he  may  well  be  pedestaled  one  of  our 
Liberators. 

After  this  fashion  I  went  to  school  to  the  Eads 
Bridge,  starting  my  course  of  instruction  at  the 
age  of  twenty-six,  and  continuing  it  with  no  little 
assiduity  for  seven  years.  I  saw  the  huge  body 
grow  from  member  to  member  like  a  living  thing 
before  my  eyes,  and  from  this  experience  I  date 
my  deeper  interest  in  construction,  which  has  re- 
mained a  permanent  factor  active  through  all  my 
work.     I  was  no  practical  builder,  indeed  the  im- 


THE  EADS  BRIDGE.  113 

mediate  manipulation  and  carpentry  of  building 
never  attracted  me  specially,  and  I  never  indulged 
in  it  for  pastime,  as  I  have  seen  many  people  do. 
For  instance,  Harris  was  a  busy  tinkerer  around 
the  house,  and  had  a  knack  in  making  ingenious 
contrivances  for  his  own  amusement  and  that  of 
his  friends.  He  invented  a  new  kind  of  skiff  or 
row-boat  to  plow  the  Concord  River,  the  most 
unique  craft  probably  ever  seen  on  that  stream. 
It  was  made  up  of  water-tight  sections,  which 
could  be  taken  apart  and  brought  home.  An  ever- 
menacing  thing,  shaky  at  the  joints  which  often 
seemed  on  the  point  of  breaking  loose  and  letting 
the  members  sail  off  by  themselves,  it  wibble-wob- 
bled  about  as  if  preparing  to  duck  us  under,  but 
never  did.  ' '  Can  you  swim  ? ' '  asked  Harris  when 
I  first  jumped  into  the  boat  with  him  for  a  ride; 
the  question  presaged  me  that  he  had  his  doubts.  I 
assured  him  that  it  would  be  only  fun  for  me  to 
make  the  shore,  and  then  after  a  little  swim  to  dry 
myself  in  the  hot  summer-sun.  "Pull  out,  I  want 
to  see  you  in  your  new  role  of  navigation,"  so  I 
cheered  him  on.  The  passing  Concordites,  paddling 
their  old-fashioned  traditional  shells,  laughed  at 
us  with  a  sneer  of  this  sort,  as  I  understood  it: 
"Those  St.  Louis  philosophers  are  trying  to  Hegel- 
ize  our  dear  old  Musketaquid. " 

Returning  to  my  education  imparted  by  the 
Eads  Bridge,  I  have  reason  to  trace  to  it  several  of 
my  lasting  tendencies.  It  impressed  upon  me  not 
only  its  own  outer  structure,  but  also  the  inner  one 


114  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

everywhere  and  in  all  things,  especially  in  my  own 
mind-world.  It  was  a  mighty  lesson  in  universal 
architechtonic,  which  I  began  to  apply  to  all  my 
knowledge.  In  a  play  of  Shakespeare,  which  sub- 
ject I  was  then  teaching  at  the  High  School,  I  could 
not  rest  till  I  had  found  the  principle  and  drawn 
the  outline  of  its  construction.  Indeed  I  then 
dreamed  of  re-building  all  of  Shakespeare's  works 
into  one  vast  dramatic  palace,  which,  however,  lay 
beyond  any  visible  representation  on  the  stage. 
Moreover  the  Bridge  became  to  me  a  kind  of  sing- 
ing poem,  day  by  day,  as  it  rose  melodious  over 
the  waters.  It  was  not  merely  a  calculated  mathe- 
matic  mechanism,  but  it  had  a  spontaneous,  crea- 
tive, quite  incalculable  music  in  its  erection,  as  if 
it  were  something  original  at  the  first  gush  of 
genius.  I  feigned  me  to  hear  its  symphony,  as  well 
as  that  of  Beethoven,  both  being  at  last  one  har- 
mony along  with  Shakespeare's. 

The  community  also  receives  a  unique  spiritual 
training,  whenever  it  beholds  a  noble  structure,  be 
it  Cathedral,  Capitol,  Temple,  or  also  the  sky- 
scraper, unfolding  and  uprearing  in  its  midst. 
"What  a  perennial  school  of  the  people  is  the 
presence  of  such  an  edifice  as  the  Parthenon, 
looked  up  at  continually  from  below  by  that  most 
impressionable  Athenian  folk-soul?  Still  today  we 
race  across  a  Hemisphere  to  see  it  for  a  little  while. 
The  Medieval  Gothic  Cathedral  was  itself  an  ever- 
living  priest  lifting  his  look  heavenward  in  prayer, 
whom  all  were  to  see  and  to  hearken  and  to  wor- 


THE  EADS  BRIDGE.  H5 

ship  with.  When  I  beheld  in  the  distance  the 
Dome  of  St.  Peter's  at  Rome,  I  felt  I  saw  the  Pope 
seated  on  his  throne,  and  calling  his  world-flock 
under  his  shelter  there  for  an  universal  orison.  My 
real  education  in  architecture  began  when  I  com- 
muned with  the  Eads  Bridge  during  its  entire  con- 
struction, and  continued  when  I  could  look  upon 
the  great  original  edifices  of  Europe,  whose  spirit 
I  found  and  could  still  trace  in  the  little  Kinder- 
garten with  its  little  building-blocks  for  little  chil- 
dren. Still  I  never  did  build  or  could  build  with 
my  hands,  but  only  with  my  mind;  architecture 
was  psychological  with  me  from  the  beginning,  and 
remained  so  till  I  had  ejected  it  out  of  my  mind  into 
a  book. 

And  now  I  am  to  pass  to  that  other  far  deeper 
and  greater,  and  really  more  massive  construction 
not  merely  of  some  outer  sense-edifice,  but  of  the 
Spirit's  inner  structure  itself — mine  own  as  well  as 
Nature's,  and  our  Creator's  also.  The  central  and 
all-absorbing  study  during  these  years  was  Hegel's 
System  of  Thought,  in  its  genesis  as  well  as  in  its 
manifold  applications  and  embodiments :  which  of 
itself  was  a  vast  construction  truly  more  spacious 
than  any  Egyptian  Luxor  and  Carnac,  being  the 
universal  philosopher's  architectomic  of  the  Uni- 
verse. 

Still  I  would  not  forget  that  the  Eads  Bridge  be- 
came to  me  a  real  physical  Logic  as  counterpart  and 
visible  confirmation  of  the  ideal  metaphysical  Logic 
of  Hegel.    Or  I  may  call  this  Bridge  a  little  echo  or 


116  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

prototype  of  the  original  Logos  or  Creative  "Word 
in  the  Beginning,  whose  science,  unfolded  and  or- 
ganized, is  or  ought  to  be  just  the  aforesaid  Logic 
or  Doctrine  of  the  Logos,  wherein  is  often  supposed 
to  lie  the  remedial  religion  of  this  our  illusory  mun- 
dane existence. 

VII. 

The  Illusion's  Antiseptic 

Philosophy  was  the  spiritual  antidote,  or  to  use 
our  modern  more  specific  term,  antiseptic,  discov- 
ered and  prescribed  by  old  Greece  for  the  World's 
Illusion.  The  form  of  this  prescription  varied 
much  according  to  the  time  and  the  doctor ;  still  it 
always  sought  to  lead  the  errant  mind  from  the  de- 
ceptive mazes  of  the  outside  show  of  things  to  the 
truth  lurking  in  all  appearances.  The  Greek 
philosopher  had  before  him  the  grand  dualism  be- 
tween Illusion  and  Reality,  or  between  the 
Ephemeral  and  the  Eternal.  There  is  little  doubt 
that  Philosophy  meant  more  to  those  antique  times 
than  it  ever  has  since,  for  with  cultivated  people  it 
had  to  take  the  place  of  religion,  especially  in  the 
later  years  of  the  Greco-Roman  period,  when  the 
old  heathen  faiths  had  lapsed. 

Philosophy,  however,  did  not  die  with  classical 
antiquity ;  there  were  still  minds  born  who  needed 
it,  and  to  whom  it  alone  could  give  healing  and 
hope.  So  the  philosophic  line  has  continued  from 
oldest  Thales  to  modernest  Bergson,  always  seeking 
to  medicate  the  same  trouble,  which  belongs  to  man- 


THE  ILLUSION'S  ANTISEPTIC.  H7 

kind  indeed,  but  which  has  hitherto  been  specially- 
prevalent  in  Europe  and  its  civilization.  So  it 
comes  that  Philosophy  is  distinctively  and  crea- 
tively European,  hardly  Oriental,  in  spite  of  nu- 
merous Oriental  Philosophies  of  which  we  read  in 
many  a  book.  The  Orient  is  fundamentally  and 
genetically  religious ;  hence  its  original  contribution 
to  the  world's  spiritual  treasure  has  taken  the  form 
of  religion.  The  question  rises  here:  Is  our 
America,  this  third  continent,  also  to  have  its  grand 
continental  discipline  of  the  Spirit,  like  Europe 
and  the  Orient  ?  I  may  whisper  now  a  thought  of 
mine,  which  will  be  developed  later,  that  our  Ameri- 
can science  universal  is  not  Philosophy,  whose  ulti- 
mate viewpoint  we  have  already  transcended  prac- 
tically, if  not  yet  theoretically.  Some  of  our  Ameri- 
can Universities  and  their  Professors  have  tried 
and  still  are  trying  to  philosophize  originally,  but 
how  pale  seem  their  efforts!  At  best  we  hear  in 
their  theories  some  faint  echoes  of  Europe  and  its 
supreme  world-discipline. 

Still  Philosophy  has  won  its  educative  place  in 
the  grand  human  training-school,  and  is  going  to 
remain  as  the  true  corrective,  or  as  we  have  labeled 
it  above,  the  antiseptic  of  the  World's  Illusion, 
preparatory  to  the  complete  positive  recovery  of  the 
mind's  wholeness.  Such  at  least  was  its  place  in 
my  own  education. 

Thus  our  Philosophical  Society  had  its  origin  and 
function  in  the  existent  circumstances.  For  it  so 
happened  that  we,  in  the  midst  of  the  St.  Louis 


118  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

form  of  the  World's  Illusion,  took  to  the  study  of 
Philosophy  by  a  kind  of  instinct,  by  a  feeling  of 
our  deepest  spiritual  need ;  we  grasped  for  this  dis- 
cipline as  remedial  of  the  time  and  specially  of  the 
city's  malady,  with  which  we  also  were  deeply  in- 
fected, for  we  in  some  way  by  means  of  it  were 
made  to  "believe  a  lie,"  if  I  dare  employ  the 
Scripture's  pitiless  tongue  of  truth. 

The  philosopher  whom  we  chose  as  guide,  or 
rather,  who  was  chosen  for  us  by  Brockmeyer,  the 
only  capable  chooser  among  us  all,  was  the  German 
Hegel,  really  the  last  entire  philosopher  of  the 
Great  Entirety,  inasmuch  as  the  philosophers  since 
Hegel  are  but  piecemeals  in  comparison  with  his 
wholeness.  "We  cannot  except  even  Herbert  Spen- 
cer, in  spite  of  his  pile  of  books,  for  his  system 
leaves  many  wide  and  deep  gaps  in  the  philosophic 
Universe ;  indeed  does  he  not  abandon  the  Universe 
itself  as  unphilosophical  ?  Spencer,  accordingly, 
we  could  not  follow  as  spiritual  leader;  really  he 
hardly  believes  in  spirit,  certainly  not  all  the  time. 
The  first  essay  of  his  own  I  ever  heard  Harris  read 
was  a  refutation  of  the  philosophy  of  Herbert 
Spencer,  whose  works  were  then  in  the  process  of 
publication  and  discussion  over  the  country.  Thus 
it  may  be  said  that  Spencer  gave  the  primal  im- 
pact which  pushed  into  print  the  St.  Louis  Journal 
of  Speculative  Philosophy  by  way  of  opposition. 

So  I  began  my  long  desperate  grapple  with  Hegel 
whose  eighteen  volumes  in  the  original  I  ordered 
from  their  old  homeland  (two  or  three  unimportant 


THE  ILLUSION'S  ANTISEPTIC.  119 

volumes,  being  out  of  print,  I  never  succeeded  in 
getting,  but  Harris  owned  them,  having  combed 
the  antiquarian  bookstores  of  all  Germany  to  catch 
them).  I  confess  that  I  alone  could  not  have  done 
the  work;  I  would  not  have  persisted  in  it  unless 
aided  by  our  associated  group  who  were  wrestling 
with  the  same  task.  Particularly  I  had  to  be  re- 
inforced and  underpropped  by  Brockmeyer's 
philosophical  genius,  equal  to  that  of  Hegel  and 
more  poetical;  but  he  lacked  Hegel's  industry  and 
organizing  power,  which  Brockmeyer's  wild  and 
wayward  but  very  inspiring  effervescences 
spurned.  And  so  it  comes  that  he  has  left  little  or 
nothing  finished  and  ordered  for  the  future  reader. 
Hence  the  final  complete  self-realization  of  his  mas- 
ter he  did  not,  perhaps  could  not,  attain. 

Thus  I  had  my  distinctive,  I  may  say,  my  ex- 
clusive Hegelian  era,  when  my  whole  intellectual 
effort  was  concentrated  upon  acquiring  the  philos- 
ophy of  the  master  and  working  it  over  into  my 
own  mentality,  and  even  into  my  own  vocabulary. 
This  absorbing  study  lasted  some  five  or  six  years 
(1865-1871)  when  I  not  only  thought  Hegel,  but 
lived  Hegel,  was  Hegel.  All  that  I  had  ever  known 
or  done  I  Hegelized  with  a  sort  of  desperation.  Un- 
doubtedly I  was  obliged  to  look  after  other  things 
in  the  meantime,  among  them  to  make  a  living  for 
my  family.  Then  Philosophy  required  me  to  be 
nerved  up  to  my  top  stretch,  else  she  would  not 
impart  any  gift  worthy  of  herself.  Hence  it  was 
necessary  to  sift  my  unworn  hours  from  the  wear 


120  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

and  tear  of  practical  life  and  to  win,  as  far  as  pos- 
sible, their  creative  treasures.  Desire  of  knowledge 
I  felt  undoubtedly,  still  that  was  an  old  feeling; 
but  why  just  this  new  form  of  knowledge  here  and 
now  ?    Let  us  turn  back  a  leaf  or  two  of  life. 

At  College  I  had  studied  Mental  Philosophy 
(good  theological  Havens  gave  name  to  the  text- 
book) in  the  usual  routine  which  made  this  subject 
a  sort  of  curiosity  or  metaphysical  gimcrack.  Its 
superficiality  I  dimly  saw  through,  and  resolved  to 
take  a  deeper  dip,  and  so  I  procured  Sir  William 
Hamilton's  big  books  on  Logic  and  Metaphysics, 
which,  recently  published,  were  then  deemed  the 
sovereign  word  of  philosophic  speculation.  Their 
learning,  their  ingenuity,  and  their  infallible  dog- 
matism captivated  me,  even  lulled  me  to  a  sense  of 
their  finality.  But  on  a  day  I  cited  them  to  Brock- 
meyer,  who  with  one  lightning  flash  of  his  consum- 
ing dialectic  (as  he  called  it)  shriveled  for  me 
Hamilton  to  a  cinder,  and  started  me  to  building  my 
own  world  over  again.  Then  too  I  caught  in  the 
flash  a  bare  glimpse  of  that  subtle  sport  of  the 
Negative  of  which  we  all  were  captives  held  fast 
in  our  city's  Great  Illusion,  Brockmeyer  included. 
I  may  here  add,  however,  that  since  then  slow- 
burning  Time  has  taken  many  years  to  do  to  Ham- 
ilton what  Brockmeyer  did  in  a  minute. 

Hence  I  kept  clutching  at  Hegel  for  dear  life. 
Can  I  impart  to  my  readers  a  brief  outline  of  my 
task?  In  the  first  place,  I  explored  in  detail  those 
eighteen  volumes  which  showed  Hegel  creating  the 


THE  ILLUSION'S  ANTISEPTIC.  121 

Universe  and  projecting  it  into  his  categories  of 
thought.  Secondly,  there  was  one  work  of  these 
volumes,  which  was  the  originative  center  of  all  the 
rest — that  was  the  Logic  or  generating  Organon 
not  only  of  Hegel,  but  of  all  philosophies,  as  well 
as  of  all  sciences.  Hence  this  Logic  has  been  called 
God  Himself  thinking  the  Universe  in  the  pure 
forms  of  thought,  or  the  science  of  the  Divine 
Logos.  Thirdly,  I  had  to  re-think  the  philosopher 
building  his  system  from  its  innermost  creative 
center  to  its  outermost  created  circumference — the 
mightiest  mental  architectomic  ever  yet  conceived 
and  executed  by  a  human  brain. 

I  have  already  alluded  to  this  Logic  as  the  heart 
of  our  philosophical  enterprise,  and  on  the  other 
hand  as  our  unique  Book  of  Fate  seemingly  hang- 
ing over  us  from  then  till  now,  ever  unrealized. 
What  all  this  means  cannot  be  explained  here,  but 
is  thrown  out  as  a  kind  of  keynote  often  to  be 
struck  hereafter,  till  the  whole  tune  be  composed  to 
its  finale.  At  present,  however,  I  may  tell  some- 
what of  my  early  grapple  with  the  brain-confound- 
ing labyrinthine  book.  It  flung  me  right  at  the 
start  into  the  most  abstract  swirl  of  human  thought : 
Being,  Nothing,  Becoming.  These  conceptions 
would  run  into  one  another,  then  out  of  one  an- 
other, then  make  a  ring  around  together,  like  a 
vast  Hegelian  vortex  in  which  I  was  dizzily  whirled, 
till  I  feared  me  I  would  never  get  out  of  that  spirit- 
ual maelstrom.  I  would  flee  from  my  narrow  rotat- 
ing room  into  the  steady  open  air,  still  my  mind 


122  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

could  not  escape  from  the  whizzing  wheel  of  Ixion, 
on  which  I  seemed  pinioned,  and  which  kept 
careening  around  through  its  ever-repeating  vor- 
tical triplicity :  to  be,  not  to  be,  to  become.  Hamlet 
stands  fixed  from  start  to  finish  in  the  dualism  of 
his  famous  soliloquy :  to  be  or  not  to  be.  That  was 
his  question,  he  declares,  but  it  was  only  a  part  of 
mine,  for  I  had  also  to  become,  and  so  my  cyclonic 
brainstorm  continued  revolving  through  innumer- 
able triads,  largest  and  least,  from  the  Universe 
down  to  the  microscopic  cell. 

The  fact  came  out,  in  this  unique  experience, 
that  I  was  really  becoming,  being  born  over  in  the 
painful  process  of  spiritual  parturition.  I  would 
wander  astray  through  the  streets  for  miles,  seek- 
ing to  walk  off  that  logical  vertigo,  till  sleep  might 
put  it  to  rest;  but  even  in  dreamland  my  brain's 
Flying  Dutchman  would  start  to  whirl  around, 
driving  ahead  under  less  control  than  when  awake. 
So  I  would  resolve  to  have  nothing  more  to  do  with 
that  infernal  Logic,  it  was  a  devil 's  dance  anyhow, 
a  juggle  to  steal  my  time,  or  perchance  to  rob  me 
of  reason.  I  threw  the  book  aside,  hid  it  from  my 
sight,  would  never  open  it  again  to  let  out  its 
demonic  brood ;  I  even  thought  of  burning  it,  fling- 
ing it  into  its  own  torturing  Hades.  But  the  next 
Sunday  afternoon  I  would  speed  to  the  philos- 
ophers* Academe  located  then  in  Salisbury  street, 
and  listen  to  their  discussions  and  translations  of 
the  master ;  again  I  noticed  the  all-coercive  univer- 
sal  training   which    our   two   leaders   manifested 


THE  ILLUSION'S  ANTISEPTIC.  123 

through  the  influence  of  that  one  writ,  although 
each  preserved  his  own  individuality  in  their  com- 
mon doctrine.  Harris  was  more  formal  and  peda- 
gogical ;  Brockmeyer  never  failed  to  break  over  de- 
fined limits,  and  to  revel  in  some  startling  ebullience 
of  thought  and  fancy.  He  could  make  all  the  fet- 
tered nomenclature  of  Hegel's  Philosophy  dance 
freely  in  its  heaviest  chains — an  astounding  feat  of 
mental  prestidigitation  in  seeming,  and  still  at  the 
same  time  most  real.  How  did  he  do  it?  Logic. 
Again  I  would  hurry  home  and  take  from  its  hid- 
ing the  same  fatal  book ;  again  the  brain-swirl  would 
begin  but  less  tyrannic.  So  I  kept  on  battling  for 
weeks,  months,  years;  finally  came  a  certain  mas- 
tery, or  at  least  disentanglement  from  that  vortical 
labyrinth  of  ever-spinning  and  interlacing  triplets 
of  categories ;  that  is,  I  could  now  spin  them  better 
than  they  could  spin  me.  Thus  I  had  become,  and  my 
microcosm  could  at  once  start  to  handle  the  macro- 
cosm, having  won  the  tools  and  learnt  the  trade. 

Then  from  the  central  genetic  book  I  would  pass 
to  its  children,  that  is,  to  its  elaborations  in  Hegel's 
other  works,  such  as  Aesthetic,  History,  State,  to- 
gether with  Nature  and  her  sciences.  But  of  these 
prolonged  but  easier  studies,  though  of  great  in- 
fluence upon  my  future  career,  I  need  now  give 
no  account.  It  was  a  time  of  pure  acquisition;  I 
appropriated  tradition  in  its  universal  form,  the 
philosophical;  I  was  still  repeating,  not  creating, 
though  possibly  getting  ready  for  the  latter.  But 
I  had  solved  inwardly  the  Illusion,  even  if  out- 


124  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

wardly  I  remained  caught  in  its  toils ;  theoretically 
I  had  found  the  time 's  antiseptic,  while  practically 
I  was  still  its  victim,  till  there,  fell  on  us  all  the 
awakening  blow  of  Disillusion. 

Having  told  my  own  experience  with  this  central 
book  of  our  St.  Louis  Movement,  I  may  here  give  a 
brief  indication  how  it  has  affected  some  typical 
intellects,  which  in  one  way  or  other  have  come 
under  my  observation.  Premising  the  mental  out- 
fit, Hegel's  Logic  works  upon  people  even 
philosophically  minded,  in  quite  opposite  ways, 
from  utter  disgust  and  rejection  to  a  devoted  loyal 
acceptance.  All  these  various  attitudes  I  have  wit- 
nessed and  heard,  and  to  some  extent  shared. 

1.  Thomas  Davidson,  the  Scotch  wandering 
scholar,  when  he  strayed  into  St.  Louis  about  1867, 
and  began  to  take  part  in  our  Movement,  soon  fell 
upon  this  fore-fronting  book,  had  his  tussle  with  it, 
and  got  badly  thrown.  I  saw  him  begin  it,  and 
watched  his  reactions.  The  result  was  a  kind  of 
fury  against  it,  a  fixed  mania  at  hearing  even  the 
name  of  Hegel,  over  which  he  could  easily  fall  into 
a  convulsion  of  damnation.  Something  of  this 
rancour  he  imparted  to  his  soul's  special  comrade, 
Professor  William  James.  The  psychology  of  his 
case  I  construe  thus:  Davidson  was  a  born  con- 
tradiction; if  he  could  not  contradict  he  was  not 
only  unhappy,  but  a  zero,  which  he  would  not  al- 
low himself  to  be.  Now  one  of  Hegel's  emphatic 
points  is  the  mediation  of  all  contradiction;  or  let 
us  call  it  contradiction's  own  inner  self -undoing — 


THE  ILLUSION'S  ANTISEPTIC.  125 

a  theorem  which  simply  undid  Davidson  himself  at 
the  very  bottom.  This  he  felt,  though  he  probably 
never  reasoned  the  matter  out.  Hence  Hegel  he 
deemed  the  devil,  the  arch  destroyer  of  himself  and 
specially  of  his  kind  of  intelligence.  Still  David- 
son obtained  his  chief  philosophic  training  through 
the  St.  Louis  Movement  during  his  eight  years' 
stay ;  it  was  his  second  University,  altogether  more 
universal  for  him  than  his  first  Scotch  University' 
of  Aberdeen. 

2.  Emerson  also  had  his  strong  objections  to 
Hegel,  for  distinctively  Emersonian  reasons.  Espe- 
cially the  Logic  he  looked  upon  with  a  kind  of  hor- 
ror, as  a  hideous  array  of  skeletons  of  once  living 
thought,  a  kind  of  death's  dance  of  osseous  cate- 
gories in  which  he  could  hear  the  dry  bones  un- 
cannily rattle.  He  shrank  from  such  an  osteology 
of  the  spirit.  The  splendid  literary  stylist,  for 
such  he  is,  wished  his  philosophy  always  to  be  cov- 
ered over  with  beautifully  tinted  metaphorical 
flesh,  like  an  Emersonian  essay  for  instance.  In 
some  such  manner  I  heard  him  express  his  cour- 
teous disapprobation  which  he  has  also  frequently 
set  down  in  writ.  .  He  probably  obtained  his  knowl- 
edge from  Sterling's  Secret  of  Hegel,  which  work 
he  had  read  with  some  care  at  the  first  stirring  of 
the  St.  Louis  Movement,  in  which  he  had  become 
interested  through  Harris,  who  told  me  the  fore- 
going fact.  Then  I  conceive  he  felt  another  repul- 
sion; for  the  close  organic  texture  of  Hegel's  writ- 
ings was  not  Emerson's,  even  if  he  longed  for  some 


126  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

system  in  his  work,  as  we  see  by  his  recently  pub- 
lished Journals.  It  was  a  later  day  when  Emerson 
must  have  been  exposed  to  a  good  deal  of  chaffing 
about  Hegel  at  the  Concord  School  of  Philosophy, 
especially  when  the  St.  Louis  Hegelians,  headed  by 
Harris,  were  there  in  the  philosophic  saddle,  and 
failed  not  to  ride  with  some  exuberance,  and  per- 
chance at  times  with  a  look  of  triumph. 

3.  Professor  William  James,  whom  I  listened  to 
at  Concord,  has  printed  his  somewhat  vehement  re- 
jection of  Hegel's  Philosophy  which,  he  declares, 
"mingles  mountain  loads  of  corruption  with  its 
scanty  merits."  And  so  forth  very  often.  What 
is  the  trouble  with  Professor  James?  Without  go- 
ing into  his  long  list  of  exceptions,  we  may  find  his 
mental  attitude  condensed  in  the  following  pass- 
age: "The  sense  of  a  universal  mirage,  of  a 
ghostly  unreality  steals  over  us,  which  is  the  very 
moonlit  atmosphere  of  Hegelism  itself."  (See 
essay  On  some  Hegelisms  reprinted  in  his  Will  to 
Believe).  This  doubtless  expresses  the  psychologi- 
cal condition  of  James  after  trying,  or  being  tried 
by,  Hegel's  Logic.  And  it  is  one  of  the  stages, 
genuine,  I  know  by  experience,  through  which  the 
student  passes  toward  the  mastery  of  Hegel.  But 
it  is  a  stage  to  be  transcended,  which  James  never 
did,  possibly  he  could  not.  Thus  the  book  for  him, 
instead  of  piercing  and  dissipating  the  given  world 
of  Illusions,  creates  a  new  one  and  really  a  worse 
one,  made  up  of  a  procession  of  ghostly  unrealities, 
which  he  cannot  get  rid  of  except  by  flight.    So  the 


THE  ILLUSION'S  ANTISEPTIC.  127 

Professor,  in  unconscious  self-criticism,  proclaims 
that  he  did  not,  and  possibly  could  not,  work 
through  the  second  or  apparitional  stage  of  the 
grand  Hegelian  world-discipline. 

4.  The  Hegelians  proper,  agreeing  about  the 
philosophical  mastery  of  all  mundane  Illusions,  and 
stressing  the  eternal  verities  of  thought  against  the 
fleeting  appearances  of  sense,  differed  not  a  little 
among  themselves.  Our  two  leaders  construed 
Hegel  diversely,  in  accord  with  their  spiritual  needs 
and  their  distinctive  mentalities.  Harris  clung  nat- 
urally to  the  fixed  insight,  or  the  separate  aperqu 
(as  he  was  fond  of  calling  it),  while  Brockmeyer's 
native  force  was  the  swift  ever-flashing  dialectic 
(as  he  designated  it  after  Hegel  and  the  Greeks). 
Still  to  both  these  friends  the  master's  Logic  was 
the  one  book  of  the  Universe,  their  real  Bible,  to 
which  they  always  came  back  for  recovery  after 
any  divagation. 

I  can  truly  say  that  this  book  never  became  to 
me  what  it  was  to  them — the  book  of  Life  and 
Death,  of  Time  and  Eternity.  Still  I  had  to  work 
through  it  with  them  and  by  their  help,  and  then 
to  work  out  of  it,  quite  by  myself,  into  another 
world-view.  But  without  my  knowing  it,  that 
Logic,  backed  up  by  the  St.  Louis  Movement  and 
its  philosophizing,  was  my  rescue  from  the 
mightiest  negative  force  of  the  age,  since  it  demol- 
ished for  me  Kant's  Critique  of  Pure  Reason, 
which  was  deeply  fermenting  in  the  philosophic 
spirit  of  the  time,  and  undermining  its  belief  in  all 


128  THE  ST.  L0VI8  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

intelligence.  Germany,  however,  went  back  to 
Kant,  denying  that  man  has  or  can  know  truth,  and 
she  practically  realized  the  Kantian  negation  in 
the  recent  war,  with  what  destructive  consequences 
to  herself  and  to  the  world  we  have  barely  begun 
to  glimpse. 

Such  was  my  five  years'  siege  of  the  most  in- 
expugnable fortress  of  writing  that  ever  arose  from 
the  mind  of  man,  challenging  the  best  human  brain 
to  daring  mental  escalade.  Veritably  it  is  a  world 
book  of  Philosophy,  the  most  difficult  book  of  the 
most  difficult  science ;  it  may  well  be  designated  as 
one  of  the  great  Philosophical  Bibles  of  the  Race, 
the  last  one  so  far,  and  the  final  summation  of  them 
all,  several  other  great  ones  being  strown  down  the 
ages  like  the  Literary  Bibles  hereafter  to  be  con- 
sidered. I  have  already  called  it  our  Book  of  Fate, 
particularly  in  relation  to  our  Philosophical  So- 
ciety and  our  two  leaders,  whom  it  fates,  and  who 
in  turn  fate  it  for  us,  as  the  outcome  of  our 
philosophical  drama  must  show,  when  this  gets 
played  to  the  end. 

But  at  last  I  felt  that  I  had  fought  myself  free 
of  it  by  intense  persistent  struggle,  and  that  it  lay 
behind  me  a  conquered,  or  anyhow  a  transcended 
domain,  from  which  I  was  destined  to  push  my  way 
to  a  new  cultural  province  in  my  life's  journey. 
Whereof  later.  At  present  I  may  repeat  that 
Hegel  had  emancipated  me  philosophically  from 
my  inner  world  of  Illusion,  but  not  from  the  outer, 
upon  which  the  blow  now  suddenly  descends. 


THE  GREAT  DISILLUSION.  129 

VIII. 

The  Great  Disillusion 

Already  attention  has  been  called  to  the  par- 
ticular stroke  of  time  and  of  fortune  whereby  St. 
Louis  was  quite  suddenly  whisked  out  of  her  long 
deep  Illusion  into  a  longer  and  deeper  Disillusion. 
That  morning  when  the  first  report  of  the  census 
of  1880  fell  from  the  newspaper  skies  down  into 
the  city,  there  rose  and  rolled  through  it  a  huge 
wave  or  rather  a  seismic  convulsion  of  dismay,  a 
tidal  deluge  of  mortal  disappointment  overpower- 
ing us  somewhence  from  the  dismal  chaos  of  the 
Beyond.  It  spared  nobody,  not  even  those  who 
knew  of  its  coming,  or  those  who  like  myself  did 
not  know,  but  had  forefelt  something  of  the  sort  in 
the  dice-throw  of  the  time.  It  was  a  panic  which 
seizes  the  disciplined  soldier,  and  carries  him  away 
in  its  flood,  as  well  as  the  raw  militiaman.  A  gloom 
then  settled  down  into  our  very  souls  as  if  we  were 
listening  to  the  crack  of  doom.  Some  or  perhaps 
many  people  here  never  felt  this  pulverizing  ex- 
perience of  the  mighty  hammer-stroke  of  Disillu- 
sion, but  the  city  did,  and  she  shows  today  the  last- 
ing impress  or  scarification  from  it  upon  the  urban 
character.  Indeed  the  stronger  statement  may  be 
made,  that  St.  Louis  still  carries  not  only  the 
cicatrice,  but  the  running  wound  from  that  fate- 
ful blow  of  Disillusion,  with  fresh  regurgitations 
after  the  hoped-for  healing  of  years  nearly  two- 


130  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

score.  For  is  she  not  calling  out  in  a  kind  of  self- 
trituration  this  very  morn:  What  is  the  matter 
with  me,  O  Doctor  ? 

The  city  was  in  love  with  its  Illusions,  which  it 
kept  dancing  before  itself  with  a  hypnotized 
fatuity;  or  more  sternly  may  run  the  indictment 
that  it  was  infatuated  with  its  own  lies,  which  it 
persisted  in  telling  to  itself,  or  in  encouraging 
others,  like  the  prophet  Reavis,  by  applause  and 
money,  to  repeat  for  its  delectation.  Can  one  help 
thinking  again  of  that  scriptural  example  which 
warns  of  when  there  is  sent  from  above  upon  men, 
communities,  nations,  "a  strong  delusion,"  so  that 
they  are  "made  to  believe  a  lie,"  just  their  own 
lie,  whereupon  follows  divine  judgment.  And 
there  was  no  Savonarola  or  even  Peter  Cartright  to 
thunder  to  us  the  Lord's  warning. 

But  turning  aside  from  biblical  interpretation, 
which  is  not  my  field,  I  hope  to  become  more  mod- 
ern and  explicit,  by  confessing  myself  to  four  fas- 
cinating shapes  of  Illusion,  which  I  delighted  to 
hug;  or,  if  you  prefer  the  undraped  word,  four 
lies  common  to  myself  and  my  fellow-citizens,  fab- 
ricated by  ourselves  but  religiously  believed,  and 
even  propagated  with  a  kind  of  fanatical  zeal — 
four  instances  of  our  fatuous  self-mendacity. 

1.  Always  must  be  first  set  down  our  Illusion  of 
unbounded  wealth,  of  commercial  supremacy,  of  a 
vast  population.  Material  prosperity  was  held  up 
as  the  grand  goal  of  the  city's  life  and  ambition. 
The  kingdom  of  Heaven  here  became  a  world-em- 


THE  GREAT  DISILLUSION.  131 

pire  of  Dollardom,  often  declared  to  be  the  great 
American  ideal  (but  I  do  not  believe  it,  par- 
ticularly now  after  the  recent  war).  The  news- 
papers, as  was  natural,  put  stress  upon  the  imme- 
diate, sensuous,  worldly  St.  Louis,  advertising  all 
its  wonderful  saleabilities.  Meanwhile  the  prophet 
Reavis,  who  wrote  books  or  at  least  pamphlets, 
piled  up  its  statistical  advantages  in  columns  of 
figures  which  he  had  the  alchemy  to  transmute  into 
solid  gold  right  before  our  believing  eyes.  And 
the  yellow  Mississippi,  bearing  dissolved  mud- 
mountains  in  its  shaggy  breast,  seemed  with  its 
whole  mass  of  yellowness  to  turn  auriferous  the 
moment  it  touched  the  St.  Louis  wharf,  and  to  re- 
new the  old  story  of  the  shining  sands  of  river 
Pactolus.  Of  course  these  falsehoods  never  could 
be  realized,  but  it  required  heavy-fisted  Disillusion 
to  smite  them  into  truth,  that  is,  into  what  they 
actually  were  out  of  the  appearance. 

2.  The  second  piece  of  jugglery,  fabricated  for 
us  indeed,  but  accepted  by  us  in  all  faith,  was  the 
fraudulent  census  of  1870.  Who  got  it  up  ?  Prac- 
tically we  demanded  it,  prayed  for  it,  and  it  was 
furnished  by  the  devil,  for  just  that  is  his  business. 
But  in  any  view  of  the  case,  this  fraud  was  the 
direct  act  of  making  us  believe  our  own  lie.  "Well, 
who  made  us  do  that?  Look  again  into  the  old 
Book  of  Books  and  ponder  its  view  of  the  problem. 
So  much,  however,  may  be  now  said :  the  Great 
Disillusion,  as  a  possible  remedial  medicine,  was 
put  off  a  decade,  and  our  prophet  could  keep  on  re- 


132  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

cording  grandiose  predictions  to  the  faithful  under 
the  shelter  of  a  colossal  deception,  promulgated  and 
vouched  for  as  true  by  the  United  States  Govern- 
ment. As  late  as  1876  Reavis  issued  his  largest 
book,  gilt-edged,  morocco-bound,  as  a  worthy  me- 
morial of  the  Centenary  of  our  national  independ- 
ence, with  title-page  still  wafting  to  us  his  old 
prophetic  mirage :  St.  Louis,  the  Future  Great  City 
of  the  World.  And  he  cited  just  that  lying  census 
as  part  of  his  proof. 

3.  In  company  with  all  St.  Louis,  I  was  made 
to  believe  the  fiery  falsehood,  truly  infernal,  which 
seemed  to  be  proclaimed  to  us  from  above  by  the 
great  Chicago  conflagration  of  1871.  On  a  royal 
October  afternoon  of  that  year  I  was  descending 
the  High  School  steps  with  a  mind  toward  home, 
when  Principal  Morgan  approached  me  holding  a 
newspaper  in  his  hand  and  pointing  to  some  mas- 
sive head-lines  themselves  aflame :  ' '  Chicago  burn- 
ing up."  Morgan,  who  with  the  peculiar  strabis- 
mic twist  of  his  eyes,  and  the  nasal  snarl  in  his 
voice,  re-inforced  by  the  vitriolic  burn  in  his  words, 
could  take-on  the  leer  and  the  sneer  of  Mephis- 
topheles,  when  he  had  the  right  provocation, 
showed  me  somewhat  startingly  one  phase  of  our 
reception  of  the  rival's  grand  fatality.  I  hurried 
down  town  for  further  information,  and  passed  be- 
fore a  newspaper  office  where  hundreds  were  read- 
ing the  bulletins.  The  crowd  was  not  boisterous, 
but  wore  the  silent  smile  of  self-gratulation ;  I 
thought  it  felt  a  secret  awe  at  the  providential 


THE  ORE  AT  DISILLUSION.  133 

catastrophe,  yet  not  without  an  exultant  hope. 
Reavis  was  there,  streaming,  puffing,  limping 
through  the  mass,  and  slapping  his  sloppy  ban- 
danna against  the  little  Artesian  wells  which  kept 
bubbling  up  along  his  front  and  running  down  his 
cheeks  in  the  quite  vain  attempt  to  wash  his  face 
of  St.  Louis  soot.  In  fact,  Reavis  always  had  to 
me  a  sooty  appearance,  not  that  of  old  Nick,  for  he 
was  fanatical  honesty  itself,  but  he  looked  as  if  in 
his  love  he  had  appropriated  the  very  garb  of  his 
darling,  the  coal-smoky  head-dress  of  his  dearest 
Future  Great  City  of  the  World.  I  did  not  hear 
him  speak  one  word,  though  he  was  often  chal- 
lenged ;  he  was  too  kind-hearted  to  exult  openly  in 
the  misfortune  even  of  his  enemy;  still  when  the 
other  man  would  crack  a  hideous  joke  over  Chi- 
cago's new  business  triumph  as  a  crematory,  he 
could  not  help  wheezing  out  one  of  his  huge- 
chested  guffaws  which  would  wind  up  in  a  pro- 
longed laughing  cough  unique  of  its  kind  and  per- 
chance symbolical.  Still  he  was  the  central  figure 
of  the  crowd,  whose  eyes  would  wander  after  him, 
though  with  a  comic  smile ;  but  I  in  body  followed 
him,  as  the  prophet  of  the  time,  till  at  last  I  heard 
drop  from  his  lips  one  brief  passage :  "I  told  you 
so;  the  Lord  is  on  the  side  of  St.  Louis." 

So  I  had  listened  to  both  the  scoffer  and  the 
prophet  upon  the  burning  text  of  the  moment.  As 
I  sauntered  meditatively  away,  I  said  to  myself: 
"Now  I  must  consult  the  final  and  greatest  oracle, 
the  philosopher  himself,  since  his  response  to  life's 


134  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

enigma  has  always  in  it  for  me  more  sunrise  than 
that  of  any  other  human  luminary. ' ' 

Accordingly  in  the  evening  I  went  to  Brock- 
meyer's  unpretentious  dwelling,  which,  nestled  in 
a  somewhat  obscure  street,  was  for  many  years  my 
shining  Delphic  temple  of  Apollo  more  light-giving 
than  any  other  edifice  to  which  I  ever  pilgrimed.  I 
found  the  philosopher  at  home ;  we  took  our  seats 
on  the  small  verandah  of  the  second  story  looking 
to  the  North-East,  when  I  interrogated  him  per- 
haps somewhat  oracularly:  "Do  you  see  that  de- 
vouring illumination  over  yonder  behind  the  river's 
bluff,  some  three  hundred  miles  distant  along  the 
lakeside  ?  Tell  me,  what  does  it  signify  to  us,  and 
to  itself,  and  to  the  future?" 

The  philosopher  never  looked  up  but  lit  his  aged 
pipe,  took  his  seat  upon  his  easy  tripod,  and 
wrapped  himself  and  me,  who  did  not  smoke,  in  the 
dreamy  philosophic  clouds  of  nicotine,  out  of  which 
issued  the  paternally  toned  voice:  "My  son,  it  is 
the  most  striking  practical  instance  of  our  oft-dis- 
cussed, little-understood,  self-undoing  Dialectic. 
Chicago  was  the  completely  negative  city  of  our 
West  and  indeed  of  our  time,  and  now  she  has  car- 
ried out  her  principle  of  negation  to  its  final  uni- 
versal consequence;  she  has  simply  negated  her- 
self. ' '  The  tobacco  clouds  reacted  certainly  on  my 
brain,  and  probably  on  my  vocal  chords,  and  made 
me  hiccough  out  in  spite  of  myself  a  kind  of  oppo- 
sition :  "Yes,  I  see,  I  see ;  but  then  the  negation  of 
the  negative  usually  brings  forth  a  positive  result 


THE  GREAT  DISILLUSION.  135 

stronger  than  ever.  Even  in  Mathematics  the  minus 
of  minus  gives  plus ;  and  there  may  be  a  big  plus 
under  all  this  minusing  of  the  minus  in  yonder  con- 
flagration ' '.  But  the  St.  Louis  philosopher  replied, 
radiating  some  heat,  with  a  scorching  streak  in  his 
tongue  against  what  he  deemed  in  me  a  sort  of 
treason:  "By  no  means,  not  at  all;  the  positive 
result  of  that  negative  is  bound  to  arrive,  as  you 
say,  but  not  over  there  in  the  same  place  again,  but 
here,  here  in  our  St.  Louis."  "I  believe  it,"  I 
cried;  "yes,  so  it  must  be."  Therewith  he  passed 
to  a  subject  which  was  getting  to  cuddle  next  to  his 
heart,  namely,  the  making  of  a  new  Constitution  for 
the  State  of  Missouri ;  which  deed  if  by  him  highly 
performed,  might  land  him  in  the  Senate  of  the 
United  States.  He  did  not  whisper  me  any  ambi- 
tion of  the  kind,  and  I  then  did  not  divine  it,  but 
somehow  the  future  always  persists  in  being 
secretly  pregnant. 

Thus  we  clung  loyally,  aye  pathetically  to  our 
city's  Great  Illusion,  even  after  the  fraud  of  1870, 
which  our  Philosophy,  if  it  had  been  equal  to  its 
opportunity,  ought  to  have  detected  or  at  least  sus- 
pected, for  which  suspicion  there  appeared  many 
bodeful  signs  hanging  out  of  the  horizon  every- 
where around  us.  Indeed  the  newspapers  flagged 
them  forth  from  all  directions  in  the  distance.  But 
the  Great  Illusion  had  the  power  of  making  the 
philosophers  pervert  and  even  deny  their  own  Phi- 
losophy, as  seen  in  the  above  instance;  practically 
we  too  were  spell-bound  by  the  lie,  even  while  we 


136  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

held  to  the  truth  of  our  doctrine.  The  charm  of 
self-mendacity  required  the  quick  gigantic  sledge- 
stroke  of  the  Great  Disillusion  to  knock  us  out  of 
our  lying  dream  into  the  possibility  of  living  awake 
in  the  world  once  again. 

4.  Already  has  been  recounted  the  diz2ying  false- 
hood of  Fortuna,  the  Goddess  whom  we  came  to  be- 
lieve in  more  than  any  other  divinity,  heathen  or 
christian.  Our  irresistible  Good-luck,  whatever  be 
our  folly  or  neglect,  rose  to  be  the  prime  article  of 
our  faith.  How  such  a  creed  saps  human  energy 
needs  no  illustration,  not  even  that  of  St.  Louis. 
And  how  utterly  faithless  to  her  most  faithful  wor- 
shipers Fortuna  turns  at  a  caprice,  has  been  cele- 
brated by  historians  and  poets  old  and  new ;  we  all 
recollect  what  ugly  irrepeatable  nicknames  our 
Shakespeare  has  heaped  upon  her,  satirizing  her 
female  fickleness  and  infidelity.  To  this  belief  was 
joined  the  cognate  one,  which  maintained  the  fate- 
like fascination  of  our  city's  personality.  At  least 
I  heard  it  spoken  to  others  as  well  as  to  myself : 
You  cannot  quit  us ;  if  you  go  away,  you  will  have 
to  come  back ;  our  spell  is  upon  you.  ' '  Flies  buzz 
where  the  honey  is,"  said  one  beautiful  St.  Louis 
lady  to  me,  with  a  conscious  smile  not  only  of  her 
city's  but  also  of  her  own  magic  power.  The  pre- 
diction turned  out  true  in  one  case  only,  that  was 
my  own;  the  other  philosophic  fugitives  never  re- 
sumed their  former  residence. 

Some  years  later,  when  I  too  had  been  compelled 
to  take  flight  to  Chicago,  and  was  at  work  there,  the 


THE  GREAT  DISILLUSION.  137 

attitude  of  St.  Louis  toward  the  Great  Fire  had 
not  been  forgotten  or  even  forgiven.  More  than 
sometimes  I  was  challenged  to  the  purgation  with  a 
spice  of  humorous  resentment.  Once  especially  a 
zealous  member  of  one  of  my  classes,  a  prominent 
lady,  recalled  with  deeper  flushes  of  wrath  growing 
aflame  how  she,  returning  from  Europe  at  that 
time,  was  insulted  on  shipboard  by  a  group  of  noisy 
St.  Louisians  celebrating  the  glorious  extinction  of 
Chicago.  Somehow  thus  my  answer  used  to  run: 
"The  census  of  1880  has  amply  avenged  you,  0 
Chicagoans,  without  your  punishing  me.  You  can 
afford  to  be  merciful ;  you  have  more  than  magni- 
fied into  solid  reality  the  ancient  legend  of  the 
Arabian  Phoenix,  which  rose  from  its  ashes  once 
in  five  hundred  years,  whereas  you  in  five  have 
accomplished  a  much  grander  palingenesis  from  the 
mightiest  urban  conflagration  that  ever  took  place 
on  our  earthball,  with  the  possible  exception  of 
fiddling  Nero's  back  in  old  Rome.  Look  at  mc,  now 
a  miserable  fugitive  from  our  St.  Louis  fire  slowly 
but  surely  edacious  of  all  vanity,  out  of  whose 
ashes  I  can  see  at  present  no  sign  of  resurrection  to 
former  glory.  Yes,  the  Phoenix  has  become  a  Chi- 
cago bird,  perched  alongside  the  American  eagle." 


CHAPTER  THIRD 

The  German  Era  op  St.  Louis 

Several  times  in  the  course  of  the  preceding  nar- 
rative it  has  been  intimated  that  St.  Louis  had  its 
pronounced  period  of  Germanization,  when  it  be- 
came in  many  of  its  most  decisive  characteristics  a 
German  city.  On  the  whole  this  time  parallels  the 
Great  Illusion,  which  we  have  just  considered,  and 
the  two  occurrences  are  connected  together  in  a  far 
deeper  sense  than  in  their  mere  synchronism,  which 
might  be  almost  if  not  altogether  an  accident. 

It  has  already  been  noticed  that  the  Philosophi- 
cal Society  drew  its  main  doctrine  out  of  the  work 
of  a  German  master,  and  had  a  German  founder. 
From  this  point  of  view  it  was  a  manifestation  of 
the  place  and  the  time;  nowhere  else  and  nowhen 
else  could  it  have  had  quite  the  same  significance. 
And  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  regarded  in  its  full 
sweep  from  then  till  now,  has  its  distinctive  Teu- 
tonic epoch  of  discipline  and  achievement,  which 
it  passed  through  and  beyond,  but  which  has  re- 
mained ingrown  with  its  character  and  work. 

Personally  I  flung  myself  into  this  fresh  outpour 
of  the  German  spirit  in  St.  Louis,  and  took  it  all  up 
into  my  thought  and  action  to  the  extent  of  my 
ability.  The  greatest  products  of  Teutonic  genius 
were  the  almost  exclusive  objects  of  my  study  dur- 
138 


THE  GERMAN  ERA  OF  ST.  L0VI8.  139 

ing  these  years.  In  our  modern  world  Germany 
has  won  and  has  held  three  grand  spiritual  su- 
premacies, the  poetical,  the  musical,  and  the  philo- 
sophical. Goethe,  Beethoven,  Hegel  were  the  sov- 
ereign creative  souls  whose  works  I  sought  to  know, 
to  live,  and  also  to  impart.  Let  it  always  be  under- 
stood that  I  was  not  alone  in  this  tendency,  for  it 
was  shared  and  propelled  by  our  circle  and  to  a 
large  degree  by  the  community.  My  opinoin  is  that 
just  during  this  German  Era  St.  Louis  gained  and 
maintained  the  cultural  primacy  of  the  West,  and 
showed  a  higher  intellectual  aspiration  than  ever 
since.  This  was  at  least  the  case  within  my  hori- 
zon, which  of  course  had  its  limits.  St.  Louis  for 
me  possessed  a  soul  with  its  definite  character  and 
psychology,  which  I  am  going  to  construe  as  dis- 
tinctly as  I  can,  through  all  its  stages  of  develop- 
ment, as  far  as  they  have  come  into  my  experience. 
It  may  be  further  observed  that  this  German  Era 
culminated  in  its  Great  Men,  pre-eminent  German- 
Americans  we  may  doubly  hyphenate  them  without 
offense,  who  were  born  in  the  old  Fatherland,  but 
migrated  to  America  and  came  to  their  supreme 
bloom  in  St.  Louis,  the  Germanized  city,  during 
these  years.  No  similar  strong  towering  individ- 
ualities of  German  origin  has  our  city  produced 
since;  indeed  such  a  phenomenon  could  occur  but 
the  one  time  at  the  favoring  conjuncture.  These 
Great  Men  of  Teutonic  blood,  I  saw  rise  here,  flour- 
ish in  their  season,  and  then  quit  the  city.  Their 
time  was  paralleled  by  our  St.  Louis  Movement, 


140  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

which  along  with  them  sprang,  as  I  probe  it,  from 
the  same  far-down  underlying  cause. 

In  fact,  this  German  Era  of  our  city,  though  it 
may  appear  single  and  accidental  on  the  surface, 
was  not  merely  the  outcropping  of  local  conditions, 
but  was  a  manifestation  of  a  far  larger  energy;  it 
belonged  to  a  great  world-drama  of  Illusion  and 
Disillusion  which  has  just  completed  its  last  act. 
"When  I  read  the  works  of  General  Bernhardi  and 
other  German  militarists  blazoning  their  concep- 
tion of  Germany's  universal  domination,  I  am  led 
to  couple  them  with  Beavis  exploiting  his  grand  il- 
lusive dream  of  St.  Louis  the  Future  Great  City  of 
the  "World.  Of  course  this  conjunction  I  could  not 
have  made  till  today  when  History  is  recording  the 
deed  and  the  destiny  of  Germany  overseas,  where 
the  era  of  the  mightiest  Illusion  and  Disillusion  of 
civilized  time  has  just  now  spent  itself  with  ap- 
palling energy,  carnage  and  suffering.  So  much 
we  all  have  to  say,  however  we  may  apportion  the 
blame,  or  take  sides. 


The  German  Overture 

I  have  already  indicated  that  when  I  reached  St. 
Louis  in  1864,  I  came  upon  the  German  possession 
of  the  city — political  and  to  a  degree  economic  pos- 
session it  could  be  designated.  In  fact,  the  Camp 
Jackson  surrender  from  this  angle  of  survey  might 
be  called  a  German  victory,  and  the  prize  was  the 


THE  GERMAN  OVERTURE.  141 

city's  control,  material  and  spiritual.  The  con- 
querors were  not  only  soldiers  but  voters,  and  could 
select  their  own  leaders,  even  those  of  highest  rank, 
who  at  the  start  had  been  Americans.  Already  a 
rupture  between  the  two  nationalities  had  taken 
place;  Blair,  the  hero  of  Camp  Jackson,  had  been 
completely  discredited ;  Lyon  had  fallen  at  the  bat- 
tle of  Wilson's  Creek;  Fremont  had  been  removed 
as  both  incompetent  and  insubordinate.  The  cleft 
between  the  Union  men  of  native  birth  and  of  for- 
eign origin  was  already  gaping  wide  and  deep 
when  I  took  my  first  glance  down  into  it  on  my 
arrival,  and  pondered  upon  it  with  a  throb  of 
anxiety.  To  be  sure,  some  American  leaders  still 
tarried  with  the  German  or  radical  side,  like  Mayor 
Thomas  and  Representative  Blow ;  and  on  the  other 
hand  some  Germans  began  to  protest  against  too 
much  Germany,  from  which  they  had  once  fled,  and 
which  they  did  not  wish  to  see  reproduced  so  fully 
on  free  American  soil.  Of  the  latter  the  intellectual 
head  was  doubtless  Colonel  Brockmeyer.  Still  the 
German  party  was  the  stronger,  and  kept  increas- 
ing in  strength  and  aggressiveness. 

At  the  close  of  the  war  the  German  soldiers  came 
home  with  a  right  exalted  sense  of  their  part  in  the 
great  national  victory,  as  well  as  of  their  political 
power  in  their  own  locality.  Many  civil  offices  were 
naturally  and  easily  taken  by  former  military  offi- 
cers as  the  just  reward  of  their  patriotic  and  peril- 
ous services.  Soon  the  city  council  could  muster 
only  two  or  three  American  or  Irish  names ;  a  Ber- 


142  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

lin  House  of  Delegates  or  the  Reichstag  could 
hardly  be  more  Teutonically  labeled.  The  Consti- 
tution-makers of  the  State  in  1864-5  chose  a  Ger- 
man as  their  President,  giving  an  uncanny  shock  to 
the  older  autochthonous  lawyers  chiefly  of  South- 
ern extraction.  The  German  language  was  intro- 
duced into  the  Public  Schools,  and  a  bilingual  citi- 
zenship was  stoutly  advocated  with  a  possible  out- 
look upon  compulsion,  which,  however,  did  not 
reach  fruition.  For  a  while  the  political  and  so- 
cial prizes  were  busily  gathered  at  home;  but  the 
Capitol  at  Washington  was  bound  to  be  captured  in 
time,  which  triumph  dawned  in  its  highest  glory 
when  Schurz  was  chosen  United  States  Senator, 
and  Finkelnburg  national  Representative.  Such 
was  the  topmost  height  and  overflow  of  the  German 
movement  or  rather  renascence  on  the  soil  of  Mis- 
souri. Moreover  it  rose  up  a  unique  phenomenon 
in  the  nation,  if  not  in  the  world.  I  may  say,  an 
early  view  of  it  in  the  distance  was  what  first 
started  me  for  St.  Louis. 

This  upburst  and  domination  of  Germanism  in 
an  American  city  had  its  budding,  bloom,  and  de- 
cline like  other  sublunary  happenings.  I  followed 
it  not  from  the  outside  but  from  the  inside;  I  not 
only  studied  it  as  an  object,  but  felt  it  and  appro- 
priated it  till  it  became  a  part  of  myself.  And 
there  were  many  natives  here  like  me — many  who 
experienced  it  as  the  uplift  of  a  new  strange  spirit 
not  elsewhere  to  be  found,  as  the  revelation  of  the 
peculiar  racial  consciousness  of  old  Teutonia  well- 


THE  GERMAN  OVERTURE.  143 

ing  forth  just  now  on  the  banks  of  the  Mississippi, 
after  having  swam  like  fabled  Arethusa  underneath 
ocean  and  continent  from  the  other  side  of  the 
earth.  A  great  opportunity  sprang  forth  for  me, 
furnished  by  the  time  and  flung  down  before  me 
simply  to  be  picked  up :  so  I  then  saw  it  and  still 
see  it.  If  I  had  traveled  to  Germany  and  studied 
there  in  a  University  for  years,  I  could  never  have 
seen  and  become  the  Teutonic  folk-soul,  such  as  I 
now  saw  and  became. 

The  duration  of  this  German  Era  of  St.  Louis,  as 
I  observed,  felt,  and  shared  it,  can  be  put  at  about 
twelve  or  fifteen  years,  without  exacting  too  sharp 
time-limits,  which  may  well  be  deemed  somewhat 
elastic  according  to  varying  viewpoint.  This  dis- 
tinctively racial  energy  at  its  dominance  may  be 
bounded  as  lying  between  the  Camp  Jackson  deed 
(1861)  and  the  retirement  of  Schurz  from  the 
United  States  Senate  (1875).  To  be  sure,  there 
was  a  before  and  an  after  to  this  Era,  a  germinal 
preparation  there  and  a  transition  into  a  new 
phasis  here.  But  dropping  these  remoter  outlooks, 
let  us  concentrate  upon  the  one  fact  just  set  forth. 

That  which  now  we  seek  to  emphasize  is  that  the 
St.  Louis  Movement  corresponds  with  the  greater 
European  Teutonic  Movement,  paralleling  the  same 
in  time,  in  energy,  and  to  a  degree  in  character. 
Let  us  compare.  In  1864  Prussia  started  the  dis- 
tinctively modern  sweep  of  Germany  toward  unity 
by  the  conquest  of  Schleswig-Holstein.  In  1866  fol- 
lowed the  overwhelming  defeat  of  Austria  with  the 


144  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

formation  of  the  first  German  Confederacy.  In 
1870  came  the  Franco-Prussian  War  winding  up  in 
the  forcible  annexation  of  Alsace-Lorraine  and  the 
renewal  of  the  German  Empire.  In  the  short  space 
of  six  years,  or  even  four,  the  work  was  done  with 
a  sudden  cataract  of  elemental  strength  which 
shook  the  Earth.  I  recollect  how  we  sensed  sympa- 
thetically the  quake  in  St.  Louis,  and  watched  the 
rapid  gigantic  upspring  of  ancient  Teutonia,  who, 
it  was  felt  by  her  sons  far  off  in  this  little  corner, 
was  revealing  herself  here  by  a  rise  to  power  and 
greatness  somewhat  similar  to  that  which  we  saw 
in  the  Eastern  Hemisphere,  even  if  much  smaller. 
Still  further  may  the  analogy  be  carried.  St.  Louis 
just  during  these  same  dozen  years  was  passing 
through  her  Great  Illusion,  that  strange  psychical 
malady  of  imagined  future  grandeur,  the  civic 
megalomania  of  her  history,  when  Reavis  was  her 
real  spokesman,  even  if  frequently  ridiculed  and 
disowned.  This  was  the  time,  then,  in  which  the 
Teuton  held  sway  in  St.  Louis,  not  by  external  con- 
quest, but  by  honest  superiority  of  voting  strength 
at  least  here  in  the  city,  even  if  disfranchisement 
was  more  fully  resorted  to  elsewhere  in  the  State. 
The  whole  community  was  borne  along  in  the  flood- 
tide  of  German  spirit.  The  majority  of  the  inhab- 
itants was  composed  of  Germans,  German-Ameri- 
cans and  Germanizers,  of  which  last  class  I  was  a 
right  specimen.  Many  native  flowers  of  German 
life  could  be  seen  and  plucked  in  the  suburban 
beer-gardens    which    enwreathed    the    whole    city 


THE  GERMAN  OVERTURE.  145 

round  about  in  a  blooming  circle.  As  to  public 
manners  and  amusements  the  people  turned  Ger- 
man ;  I  joined  a  German  club  in  which  English  was 
tabooed  and  in  some  cases  unknown.  The  beer- 
house was  then  in  its  glory  as  a  popular  resort, 
especially  Tony  Niederwieser's  Valhalla,  and 
George  Wolbreeht's  Tivoli.  In  the  latter  Gam- 
brinus  effloresced  or  rather  effervesced  with  the 
highest  overflow  of  his  divine  frothiness,  melodious- 
ly attuned  to  the  notes  of  the  largest  and  best  or- 
chestra in  town.  What  a  music-drinking  folk,  one 
had  to  exclaim,  for  the  rather  bitter  liquid  would 
not  go  down  unless  mingled  with  sweet  sounds. 
Here  I  saw  the  real  Teutonic  people  in  its  heart's 
attunement  to  life's  ills  and  joys.  There  was  a  tri- 
umphant swing  in  the  crowd,  a  consciousness  that 
it  was  on  the  time's  top  just  here  in  St.  Louis  as 
well  as  on  the  other  side  of  the  globe.  Very  different 
is  the  present  urban  feeling,  as  I  construe  it,  rather 
that  of  being  the  under  dog.  At  any  rate  we  now 
hear  nothing  of  the  Future  Great  City  of  the 
World. 

Was  there  some  deep  undercurrent  of  connection 
between  German  St.  Louis  and  the  old  or  rather 
the  new  Fatherland  in  Europe  ?  I  now  believe  that 
there  was  a  spiritual  transformation  going  on  dur- 
ing these  years,  an  inner  change  common  to  both. 
Through  its  massive  display  of  victorious  energy, 
the  German  spirit  all  over  the  world  began  to  deem 
its  blood-kin  the  superior  race,  which  was  destined 
to  rule  other  peoples,  to  possess  the  wealth  and  even 


146  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

to  mold  the  mind  of  the  rest  of  mankind  after  its 
pattern.  Such  was  the  Great  German  Illusion  which 
then  arose  in  Europe  and  is  just  now  (end  of  1918) 
breaking  to  pieces  in  one  vast  cataclysm  of  Disillu- 
sion. It  was  natural  that  we  here  in  St.  Louis 
should  get  some  echo  of  the  mighty  world-historical 
upburst  of  our  racial  congeners  across  the  ocean. 
Every  year  hundreds,  yea  thousands  of  the  more 
educated  and  wealthy  class  of  Germans  went  over 
to  the  re-born  Fatherland,  and  drank  of  the  new 
spirit  at  head-waters,  bringing  copious  potations  to 
be  dispensed  on  this  side.  Every  such  traveler  was 
a  sort  of  missionary  of  the  new  Teutonic  gospel,  and 
formed  a  link  in  a  vast  chain  of  unconscious  propo- 
gandism.  I  wished  to  start  as  a  pilgrim  to  the  Ger- 
man Holy  Land  across  the  seas  in  spite  of  my  nearly 
empty  treasury,  but  I  got  caught  and  held  in  an- 
other kind  of  web ;  then  I  consoled  myself :  What 
is  the  use  of  going  over  yonder  to  find  Teutonia, 
when  you  see  her  naked  soul  before  your  eyes  just 
here  in  St.  Louis  every  day  on  the  streets  ?  You  may 
well  doubt  if  you  will  be  able  to  observe  her  in  her 
old  covered  home  so  completely  at  first  hand,  as 
you  can  right  now,  while  she  hovers  about  our  cen- 
tral Court  House  in  hundredfold  forms  of  self- 
revelation. 

Another  chief  vehicle  of  Inter-Teutonism  at  that 
time  was  the  surprising  circulation  of  German  Lit- 
erature here  in  the  West,  both  periodical  and  per- 
manent. No  less  than  three  considerable  German 
book-stores,  well-stocked  and  doing  good  business, 


THE  GERMAN  OVERTURE.  147 

were  in  the  city  at  the  close  of  the  War,  not  to 
speak  of  many  lesser  shops  ever  ready  to  send 
orders  to  Leipzig  and  Berlin  for  old  and  new  vol- 
umes. All  these  places  were  manned  with  a  trained 
German  book-seller,  known  over  the  entire  globe  as 
the  unparalleled  of  his  kind,  and  as  the  main  pillar 
of  the  vast  German  book-trade,  being  found  in 
Asiatic  Tiflis  and  African  Timbuctoo  as  well  as  in 
our  Western  cowboy  town  of  Hardscrabble.  But 
alas !  in  St.  Louis  now,  after  fifty  years,  when  it  has 
perhaps  four  times  as  many  inhabitants  for  readers, 
I  wander  in  melancholy  reminiscence  amid  his  old 
haunts  and  find  him  not ;  only  one  pale  ancient  sur- 
vivor off  to  one  side  I  may  trace,  and  he  discloses 
me  his  business  to  be  more  English  than  German. 
Nor  is  that  all.  No  sooner  had  I  taken  my  first 
sleep  in  St.  Louis,  than  I,  as  insatiable  book  fiend, 
crawled  out  of  bed  and  swallowed  a  bite,  then  drew 
or  was  drawn  to  the  English-speaking  book-stores, 
of  which  I  found  three  good  ones,  independent  and 
self -sufficing,  all  of  them  prominently  located  on  the 
main  thoroughfares.  Of  these  three  not  even  a 
ghost  is  left  to  hint  of  previous  existence.  To  such 
a  vanished  non-entity  has  red-blooded  Literature 
been  here  reduced  by  envious  old  Time  wreaking 
for  some  guilt  his  intellectual  vengeance  on  St. 
Louis,  whose  supreme  literary  utterance  is  now  re- 
duced to  our  newspaper,  confessedly  the  ephemeral 
record  of  the  Ephemeral. 

The  once  unique  and  powerful  individuality  of 
the  city  had  then  the  charm  to  attract  many  men  of 


148  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

talent  who  saw  here  their  future  in  glowing  even  if 
in  illusive  magnitude.  Afterward  our  town  became 
noted  for  putting  to  flight  its  ablest  and  most  emin- 
ent characters  under  the  maddening  strokes  of  the 
Great  Disillusion.  But  at  the  time  I  speak  of,  when 
we  were  propelled  by  the  demonic  energy  of  the 
Great  Illusion,  the  city  seemingly  turned  to  a  vast 
magnet  which  compelled  to  its  bosom  all  the  floating 
genius  of  the  land,  in  every  stage  of  reason  and  un- 
reason, moneyed  and  much  oftener  moneyless.  So 
each  little  piece  of  human  ambition  came  flying  as 
it  were  through  the  air  to  the  center  of  attraction, 
where  it  might  drink  its  fill  of  the  strange  power 
which  seemed  here  bubbling  up  from  the  very  cob- 
ble-stones of  the  wharf.  This  living  stream  of 
choice  spirits  has  by  no  means  quit  us  wholly,  still 
its  mass  has  turned  away,  we  all  know  whither  and 
for  what  reason. 

Predominantly  this  was  the  German  Era  of 
mighty  effervescence  quite  belting  the  globe.  The 
result  was  Teutonic  St.  Louis  drew  unto  itself  by  its 
own  native  energy  during  this  epoch,  besides  many 
lesser  luminaries,  the  two  most  gifted  and  distin- 
guished German-speaking  men  that  ever  landed  in 
the  United  States,  as  time  has  shown.  Both  of  them, 
laying  their  foundation  in  our  city,  were  destined 
to  build  for  themselves  wonderful  life-structures 
which  may  be  said  to  have  overarched  our  whole 
country.  Pulitzer  in  heavy-soled  army  brogans  trod 
our  paving  stones  first  in  1866,  the  birth-date  of 
the  Philosophical  Society;  Schurz  came  to  us  a 


THE  GERMAN  OVERTURE.  I49 

year  later — both  of  them  in  the  upswell  of  the 
Great  Illusion,  and  doubtless  borne  by  it  skyward 
to  loftiest  outlook  on  futurity,  whose  highest  favors 
they  afterwards  clutched. 

I  am  aware  that  my  selection  of  one  of  these  men 
will  be  sharply  challenged,  especially  by  many  good 
Germans  of  St.  Louis,  who  differ  among  themselves 
about  their  greatest  American  representatives.  I 
may  say,  however,  that  I,  though  living  in  the  same 
city,  was  wholly  detached  from  both  these  persons, 
owing  them  nothing,  no  special  love  or  hate,  but 
only  a  right  human  appreciation.  For  years  I 
watched  them  both  with  interest,  but  at  arm's 
length,  in  their  local  as  well  as  in  their  national 
careers,  to  which  each  of  them  rose  under  the  fierce 
search-light  of  political  fame.  Neither  of  them  was 
directly  connected  with  the  St.  Louis  Movement, 
though  they  and  it  were  offshoots  of  the  same  Teu- 
tonic Igdrasil  or  earth-tree  which  was  then  sending 
forth  so  many  vigorous  sprouts  over  land  and  sea 
around  the  globe.  To  me  each  of  them  had  an  edu- 
cative value,  which  I  believe  is  significant  still  to- 
day. They  are  our  greatest  foreign-born,  not  only 
as  German  but  as  European ;  and  each  of  them  de- 
veloped a  strain  in  American  life  seemingly  impos- 
sible to  a  native. 

Accordingly  of  the  German  Era  of  St.  Louis,  and 
I  may  add,  of  myself  also,  I  select  these  two  emi- 
nent personages  as  the  most  distinctive  and  best- 
known  representatives.  I  was  here  when  they  came 
and   when   they  left,   thus  my  presence   at   least 


150  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

spanned  their  St.  Louis  careers,  of  which  I  knew 
the  public  acts,  and  I  heard  privately  some  of  the 
secret  ones  in  my  unobserved  corner  of  observa- 
tion. 

II 

Carl  Schurz  of  St.  Louis 

Can  we  strike  the  keynote  of  his  character  at  the 
start,  even  if  it  rises  and  falls  through  many  start- 
ling variations  ?  Let  it  now  be  said  that  Schurz  was 
more  critical  than  constructive;  a  much  greater 
moralist  than  institutionalist.  In  his  booklet  on 
Lincoln,  often  called  his  masterpiece,  he  reveals 
himself  even  more  fully  than  his  hero ;  he  sees  and 
stresses  Lincoln's  moral  and  emotional  nobility,  but 
has  little  insight  into  the  institutional  achievement 
of  the  Union's  Savior.  From  what  has  been  al- 
ready said,  such  a  preacher,  however  eloquent  and 
personally  worthy,  could  have  had  not  much  Gos- 
pel for  the  St.  Louis  Movement.  About  Philosophy 
Schurz  seems  to  have  known  little  and  cared  less; 
I  find  in  his  Reminiscences  only  a  few  shots  of 
derision  at  this  great  world-discipline.  And  I  re- 
member one  contemptuous  broadside  against  Hegel, 
probably  second-hand.  Still  he,  as  a  German  could 
hardly  help  imbibing  somewhat  of  the  philosophic 
spirit  of  his  land  and  time ;  wherein  he  appears  to 
me  to  have  appropriated  more  of  the  Kantian  de- 
struction than  of  the  Hegelian  reconstruction.  I 
can  recall  no  career  that  becomes  so  completely  the 


CARL  SCHURZ  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  151 

incarnation  of  Kant's  Categorical  Imperative  with 
its  triumph  ever  bringing  on  its  complementary  de- 
feat. In  fact  Schurz's  whole  life  might  be  con- 
densed into  this  everlasting  jolt  between  his  own 
self's  opposites. 

Still  let  it  be  emphasized  that  just  such  a  man 
with  just  such  limits  drawn  tyrannically  upon  him 
along  with  his  unique  oratorical  gift,  was  the  tonic 
then  most  needed  in  American  political  life.  I  first 
heard  Schurz  in  1858  while  I  was  an  undergraduate 
of  Oberlin  College,  where  I  was  going  to  school 
openly  to  the  ancient  classics,  but  far  more  deeply 
to  my  own  times,  in  which  Conscience  and  the  Con- 
stitution or  the  Moral  and  the  Institutional  had 
gripped  each  other  by  the  throat.  Both  principles 
were  fighting  inside  me,  a  boy  of  seventeen,  as  well 
as  outside  me,  in  the  whole  country ;  and  both  sides, 
the  country  and  myself,  were  getting  ready  to  ap- 
peal the  dispute  to  the  last  tribunal,  which  renders 
its  decision  through  fire-arms.  Schurz  then  made 
a  more  vivid  appeal  to  me  than  ever  afterwards ;  I 
heard  him  often  a  dozen  years  later  in  St.  Louis, 
but  there  had  been  a  change,  possibly  in  him,  cer- 
tainly in  me.  He  was  still  under  thirty  when  he 
delivered  that  first  speech  at  Oberlin,  and  his  Eng- 
lish language  was  hardly  five  years  old,  for  he  had 
come  to  America  in  1852  at  the  age  of  twenty-three, 
whereupon  he  naively  jots  down  in  his  Reminis- 
cences :  ' '  My  first  task  was  to  learn  English. ' '  He 
had  found  the  most  congenial  field  of  his  life  in  the 
seething  anti-slavery  agitation  of  which  little  Ober- 


152  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

iin  was  rather  the  most  violent  maelstrom  in  that 
time's  turbulent  ocean.  I  read  his  speeches  in 
translation  with  responsive  thrills,  and  obtained  his 
German  ones,  whose  meaning  I  tried  at  the  time  to 
dig  out  by  aid  of  grammar  and  dictionary.  Espe- 
cially his  critique  of  Squatter  Sovereignty  ecstasied 
the  boy-politician,  who  never  could  get  to  be  so 
political  again  in  all  his  life. 

It  was  therefore  an  interesting  fact  for  me  when 
Schurz  came  floating  into  St.  Louis  some  three  years 
after  my  arrival,  probably  in  response  to  the  same 
strong  undercurrent  of  the  time  which  was  draw- 
ing both  the  little  and  big  fishes  to  the  one  whirling 
center  of  population,  now  lashed  to  the  height  of 
strenuosity  by  the  Great  Illusion.  Undoubtedly 
the  German  element  of  the  city  had  prepared  the 
way  for  him,  inasmuch  as  he  at  once  became  a  chief 
editor  of  the  Westliche  Post,  then  probably  the 
most  influential  German  newspaper  of  the  country, 
since  it  voiced  the  largest  purely  German  con- 
stituency in  America,  which  also  had  its  own  life 
and  goal.  This  step  however  was  only  preparatory 
to  the  greater  ambition,  namely  the  Missouri  Sen- 
atorship,  which  was  foreseen  to  lie  in  the  hands  of 
the  Germans,  could  they  but  find  the  proper  man. 
After  the  Civil  "War  Schurz  seemed  to  be  drifting, 
and  was  ready  to  hear  and  follow  his  people's  call 
to  St.  Louis. 

He  was  elected  Senator  by  the  Missouri  Legisla- 
ture in  1869,  and  his  sexennial  term  was  the  high- 
est fulfilment  of  himself  as  well  as  of  the  German 


CARL  SCHVRZ  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  153 

Era  of  St.  Louis.  He  was  then  forty  years  old,  at 
his  best  physically  and  intellectually.  He  never 
quite  got  rid  of  a  German  accent  in  his  English 
speech,  though  he  improved  much;  at  Oberlin  I 
recollect  he  would  still  Teutonize  strongly  certain 
words  like  poobleek,  almost  to  an  indistinguishable 
sound-jumble.  The  prize  he  won  of  being  the  na- 
tional spokesman  of  his  German  folk,  especially  in 
the  field  of  newspaperdom  and  stump-speaking,  for 
he  hardly  rose  into  the  higher  region  of  Literature. 
His  English  ran  correct  and  fluent  enough,  though 
not  fully  idiomatic  and  easily  limpid  except  when 
he  broke  into  denunciation.  In  the  use  of  negative 
speech  such  as  satire,  irony,  sarcastic  retort,  he 
could  tap  the  original  well-head  of  English;  but 
when  it  came  to  the  more  subtle  figures  of  poetry, 
he  could  not  command  them  from  their  first  gush- 
ing sources.  Even  when  he  employed  them,  which 
was  not  often,  they  were  something  second-hand, 
though  elevated  and  appropriate.  So  it  comes  that 
his  eloquence  has  no  enduring  literary  note. 

Still  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  the  most  wonder- 
ful and  lasting  part  of  his  career  was  Schurz  the 
orator.  "We  must  recollect  that  he  learned  his  Eng- 
lish after  he  was  fully  grown,  and  that  he  ranked 
with  the  best  American  campaign  speakers  in  their 
own  tongue,  and  at  the  same  time  he  was  supreme 
in  his  native  German.  And  he  always  gave  a  gen- 
uine moral  uplift,  not  very  congenial  with  prac- 
tical politics,  even  if  in  his  own  career  he  turned 
now  and  then  a  surprising  political  somersault.  For 


154  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

with  all  his  moralism  he  could  round  a  sharp  corner 
at  a  pinch.  But  nobody  ever  justly  thought  him 
corrupt  or  only  a  time-server,  even  when  he 
served  time  a  little.  Still  his  unique  feat  and  ever 
memorable  was  the  linguistic,  though  keen  peda- 
gogues might  think  they  could  detect  in  his  word- 
gift  that  his  English  was  not  his  mother-lisp,  and 
that  they  could  hear  the  German  accent  not  only 
on  his  tongue  but  in  his  style.  Something  of 
the  kind  about  himself  he  implies  once  at  least  in 
his  Reminiscences. 

Even  before  the  War  educators  propounded  the 
question  to  Schurz:  How  did  you  acquire  your 
mastery  of  oratorical  English?  His  answer  went 
the  rounds :  chiefly  from  the  study  and  appropria- 
tion of  the  Letters  of  Junius.  I  remember  hearing 
that  statement  at  College,  and  bought  at  once  the 
book,  reading  it  with  diligence  and  committing  the 
thunderous  invectives  to  memory.  Now  I  hold  it 
deeply  characteristic  of  Schurz  that  he  chose  as  his 
stylistic  model  the  damnatory  Junius,  not  the  con- 
ciliatory Burke  nor  the  institutional  "Webster,  the 
two  greatest  English-speaking  orators,  both  of  whom 
had  the  gift  to  elevate  their  temporary  political  ut- 
terance into  lasting  literature.  Junius  is  indeed 
the  English  classic  of  invective  and  malediction, 
with  which  Schurz  had  but  too  much  psychical 
affinity.  Junius  only  intensified  in  Schurz  a  men- 
tal quality  of  which  nature  had  already  given  him 
more  than  enough.  He  was  an  innate  fault-finder ; 
he  confesses  to  a  natural  love  of  contention  (so  we 


CARL  SCHURZ  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  155 

may  translate  his  somewhat  veiled  Latin  phrase 
about  himself,  gaudium  certaminnis) .  In  Missouri 
his  was  the  hand  that  shivered  into  fragments  his 
own  party  which  had  elected  him  Senator,  and  so 
completely  did  it  droop  asunder  that  it  could  not 
pull  itself  together  again  for  a  generation,  with 
force  enough  to  win  a  victory  in  the  State.  He  was 
right  in  opposing  disfranchisement,  which  ought 
never  to  have  been  enacted,  certainly  not  in  the 
way  it  was.  Missouri  had  shown  herself  overwhelm- 
ingly loyal  to  the  Union  from  the  start  without  dis- 
franchisement, which  thus  could  have  no  true  mean- 
ing outside  of  hate  and  corruption. 

Accordingly  Schurz,  the  German  interloper  as 
he  was  often  called,  soon  fell  out  with  the  old  lead- 
ers who  had  sustained  the  battle  of  emancipation 
and  of  the  Union,  such  men  as  Governor  Brown, 
General  Blair  the  hero  of  Camp  Jackson,  and  espe- 
cially his  fellow-senator  Charles  D.  Drake.  "Well 
might  the  returned  Confederates  erect  to  Schurz  a 
monument,  for  through  him  chiefly  they,  a  decided 
minority,  won  what  they  never  could  win  on  the 
battlefield,  the  political  control  of  the  State,  and 
kept  it  for  decades.  To  be  sure  he  cut  his  own 
throat  in  the  process,  a  feat  which  he  succeeded  in 
performing  more  than  once;  and  he  witnessed  his 
own  triumphant  self-negation  when  he  was  suc- 
ceeded in  1875  by  Cockerill,  a  former  Confederate 
General. 

Still  I  hold  that  Schurz  was  the  greatest  Sen- 
ator Missouri  has  had  in  this  her  nearly  finished 


156  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

century  of  Statehood,  with  the  exception  of  Ben- 
ton. He  performed  the  very  highest  service  of  the 
time  to  the  country,  courageous  and  almost  single- 
handed,  in  his  criticism  of  President  Grant  and  the 
militaristic  party,  assailing  corruption,  nepotism, 
and  all  sorts  of  insolent  extravagance.  Schurz 's 
term  coincided  with  the  Reconstruction  period,  in 
some  respects  a  deeper  menace  than  the  Civil  War 
itself.  I  know  that  I  was  more  discouraged  at  the 
political  outlook  then  than  ever  in  Lincoln  rs  day. 
The  voice  of  Schurz  seemed  almost  the  only  hope, 
even  if  it  was  chiefly  critical  and  negative,  hardly 
constructive  and  positive.  But  has  bold  incisive 
surgical  laceration  was  just  what  was  needed  for 
the  time's  cancer.  Our  native  Sumner,  his  chief 
Senatorial  yoke-fellow,  though  vitriolic  in  his  de- 
nunciation of  abuses,  was  not  equal  to  the  crisis, 
since  he  was  fatally  wrong  in  his  attitude  toward 
the  Southern  problem.  Thus  to  my  view  for  a 
while  Senator  Schurz  towered  up  the  greatest  Pub- 
lic Man  in  the  United  States.  Blair,  once  our 
heroic  figure  of  St.  Louis,  then  seated  in  the  Na- 
tional Senate  beside  Schurz,  appeared  diminuitive 
in  comparison,  though  he  too  was  hostile  to  the  Ad- 
ministration 's  misdeeds. 

Schurz  felt  the  ephemerality  of  his  newspaperism 
and  of  his  stumpification ;  hence  he  wished  to  write 
a  work  of  permanent  worth.  He  favored  the  field 
of  History,  and  chose  one  of  its  American  phases. 
But  the  book  could  not  get  itself  done,  since  the 
immediate  conflict  of  the  moment  had  too  great 


CARL  SCHURZ  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  157 

charm  for  him  and  catered  to  his  innate  delight  in 
controversy — a  temperament  not  well  fitted  for 
sedate  impartial  History.  Then  Schurz  was  in- 
tensely a  man  of  the  present,  not  of  the  past.  His 
work  on  Sumner  also  refused  to  finish  itself,  prob- 
ably for  a  good  reason.  He  did  complete  a  life  of 
Henry  Clay,  for  which  he  received  a  good  deal  of 
praise  and  some  money ;  but  I  do  not  like  to  think 
of  Schurz  writing  such  a  book  for  pay  or  fame ;  he 
never  lived  the  life  of  Clay,  never  believed  in  Clay's 
main  doctrines,  and  hence  could  not  exalt  his  own 
work  into  an  expression  of  his  deepest  selfhood. 
Perhaps,  however,  just  his  love  of  opposition,  his 
professed  gaudium  certaminis  made  him  write  such 
a  book. 

Dare  I  now  look  back  and  try  to  choose  for 
Schurz  his  grandest  theme  for  an  immortal  work? 
It  is  evident  from  his  Reminiscences  that  he  longed 
to  leave  behind  himself  some  lasting  contribution 
to  American  Letters.  My  selection  for  him  might 
be  titled:  "Six  Years'  View  in  the  Senate  of  the 
United  States,"  recalling  Benton's  famous  and  en- 
during book.  The  subject  would  be  in  essence :  the 
dangers  produced  by  the  military  mind  when  put 
in  charge  of  our  or  any  civil  government.  Such 
was  the  underlying  thought  of  Schurz 's  entire  Sen- 
atorial term;  he  poured  into  its  utterance  all  his 
powers  of  argument  and  invective ;  he  reached 
therein  his  own  highest  point  not  merely  of  elo- 
quence but  of  self-realization.  He  lived  his  theme 
with  all  his  might,  and  I  believe  the  best  part  of 


158  THE  ST.  LOVIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

the  nation,  not  excluding  his  political  opponents, 
lived  it  with  him.  On  his  seventieth  birthday 
(1899)  when  he  was  toasted  with  so  many  flatteries 
let  him  resolve  to  himself :  ' '  My  immortal  task  is 
yet  to  be  done;  in  my  coming  seventies  I  shall  pass 
in  review  what  I  did  in  my  Senatorial  forties,  soft- 
ening the  personal  asperities,  but  preserving  the 
original  energy  of  conviction." 

But  he  did  not,  perhaps  could  not,  do  it.  His 
theme  was  essentially  militarism  as  our  national 
problem.  We  have  the  same  word  and  thing  today 
with  an  enormous  widening  of  significance,  verily 
earth-embracing.  Indeed  it  threatens  just  now  to 
rise  with  increased  might  in  the  United  States.  You 
and  I  would  be  reading  Schurz  at  present,  if  he 
had  written  such  a  work,  and  it  could  have  been 
made  a  world-book,  for  all  times  and  for  all  lands. 
Truly  his  conflict  with  Grant  (whom  we  all  honor 
and  admire  for  his  great  military  services)  has  be- 
come universal — the  right  theme  for  a  great  writ. 
Doubtless,  Schurz  had  his  petty  personal  griev- 
ances against  the  President,  who  took  away  his 
Senatorial  patronage  and  otherwise  stung  him  to 
resentment;  still  he  had  the  sense  to  keep  to  him- 
self his  private  chagrins,  but  stabbed  all  the  more 
savagely  the  public  abuses  of  the  Administration, 
whereby  the  people  received  the  benefit. 

No,  he  did  not  write  it — the  work  of  all  his 
works,  and  so  he  falls  rearward  of  Benton,  to  whom, 
however,  he  stands  next.    He  stops  short  even  in  his 


CARL  SCHURZ  OF  ST.  LOUTS.  159 

Reminiscences  with  Grant's  political  appearance, 
after  three  big  volumes  of  interesting,  but  often  in- 
significant details,  so  that  his  book  shows  us  again 
a  kind  of  Hamlet  un-Hamleted.  He  gives  his  ex- 
cuse, but  it  accuses  him  the  more.  That  greatest 
deed  of  his  he  should  have  seized  and  recorded  first 
of  all,  then  he  might  celebrate  his  youth's  valorous 
adventures  with  Kinkel,  in  all  the  delight  of  old- 
age's  reminiscence.  I  have  to  ask :  why  did  the  vet- 
eran Schurz,  still  active  on  the  battle-line,  show 
the  white  feather  at  the  ghost  of  Grant,  when  he 
had  once  bearded  so  courageously  the  living  reality 
right  in  the  Presidential  chair?  Several  answers 
possible,  but  let  them  pass. 

Still  I  like  to  recall  Schurz  riding  on  his  highest 
wave  of  influence,  making  himself  for  a  while  the 
personal  pivot  of  his  whole  adopted  country.  This 
concentrated  itself  to  one  deed  in  the  Liberal-Re- 
publican Convention  at  Cincinnati  in  1872;  as  a 
born  alien  he  could  not  become  President,  but  he 
could  make  Presidents.  Hence  the  scoffers  dubbed 
him  our  American  "Warwick,  the  King-maker  of  old 
English  History,  kept  famous  by  the  stage  of 
Shakespeare.  But  Schurz,  the  fault-finding  mor- 
alist, could  not  control  the  political  forces  which  he 
had  set  to  storming;  his  own  convention  became  a 
wild  runaway  even  with  him  holding  in  hand  its 
reins,  and  tumbled  him  over  headforemost  into  nom- 
inations which  utterly  disgusted  him,  but  which  he 
had  to  stomach  as  his  own  bitter  medicine.  Later 
he  continued  to  show  some  signs  of  the  President- 


160  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

maker,  but  he  never  again  had  the  same  pre-emi- 
nen  in  that  field. 

Sehurz  was  often  the  lofty  stimulating  moralist, 
but  he  could  drop  back  into  the  platitudinous  mor- 
alizer,  especially  when  hard  pushed  for  a  stop-gap 
to  fill  out  some  vacancy  in  his  oratory.  From  this 
side  of  him  came  his  sympathy  with  New  England, 
mental  and  even  physical,  for  to  me  Sehurz  looked 
more  like  a  Yankee  than  a  typical  German,  being 
meager-fleshed,  thin-faced,  with  a  glance  of  Puri- 
tanic severity  almost  cutting  from  behind  those 
blue-eyed  spectacles  of  his.  He  was  always  fea- 
tured to  me  with  an  overcast  of  critical  melancholy, 
which  never  failed  to  throw  down  into  my  face  a 
glance  of  condemnation  from  his  tall  rather  skele- 
toned stature.  This  feeling  may  have  been  my  own 
reaction  of  a  bad  conscience.  Certainly  Sehurz 
never  appeared  to  me  the  burly  Teuton,  still  less 
the  jolly  Rhinelander  given  over  to  infinite  gusta- 
tion and  imbibition,  though  Sehurz  was  from  the 
Rhine,  and  could  brighten  up  in  praise  of  its  Johan- 
nisberger  and  its  other  appetitive  delicacies. 

Thus  the  German  Era  of  St.  Louis  attracted  and 
evolved  to  his  highest  self-realization  our  greatest 
German  fellow-citizen.  But  the  other  Teutonic 
genius  of  our  city,  my  special  friend,  could  never 
extricate  himself  from  his  own  handicaps,  and  so  re- 
mained unrealized  in  the  best  of  him  till  his  evan- 
ishment.  Brockmeyer  and  Sehurz  knew  each  other 
and  even  brushed  against  each  other  at  the  afore- 
said Cincinnati  Convention,  but  they  were  mutually 


JOSEPH  PULITZER  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  \Q\ 

repellent  in  their  deepest.  So  I  try  to  compare 
them:  Brockmeyer's  ultimate  command  was  the 
enacted  Law  of  associated  Man,  Schurz's  ultimate 
command  was  the  categorical  Imperative  of  the 
moral  Man.  Brockmeyer  ignored  or  rather  defied 
too  much  the  moral  element  of  his  own  spirit,  while 
Schurz  was  weak  in  the  institutional  element  of 
human  progress — another  reason  why  he  could  not 
have  written  a  great  history. 

But  already  has  been  darting  before  my  imagina- 
tion another  representative  of  the  German  Era  of 
St.  Louis.    Let  him  appear. 

Ill 

Joseph  Pulitzer  op  St.  Louis 

As  I  set  my  pencil  on  paper  to  jot  down  my 
views  under  this  caption,  I  can  hear  protests 
against  them  from  friends  and  foes  of  Pulitizer, 
for  he  had  a  sufficiency  of  both.  My  first  proposi- 
tion about  him  will  rouse  a  bitter  denial  and  prob- 
ably some  profanity,  though  my  words  may  not  be 
worth  a  curse  when  I  say :  Pulitzer  was  the  great- 
est master  of  Journalism  that  has  yet  arisen  in 
these  United  States.  He  saw  its  meaning  and  real- 
ized its  power  and  place  in  American  life  more 
fully  than  any  other  man  of  his  guild;  indeed  if 
America  has  produced  the  greatest  newspapers  in 
the  world,  as  is  sometimes  declared,  Joseph  Pulitzer 
must  be  acclaimed  the  world's  greatest  journalist. 


162  THE  ST-  LOms  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

His,  then,  is  a  world-historical   position,    and   de- 
mands our  best  consideration  in  its  own  right. 

Still  I  would  have  no  call  to  mention  him  here, 
if  he  had  not  been  in  his  way  connected  with  the 
St.  Louis  Movement  and  with  its  chief  sponsors, 
and  indirectly  with  myself,  though  for  him  person- 
ally I  never  won  any  intimacy.  Moreover  he  was 
a  familiar  figure  on  our  streets  during  many  years, 
in  fact  during  the  whole  period  of  the  Great  Illu- 
sion, in  which  he  deeply  shared,  blowing  gaudy 
journalistic  bubbles  of  the  Future  Great  City  of 
the  "World.  His  spectacled  look  and  his  aggressive 
swing,  along  with  his  unique  olfactory  develop- 
ment would  single  him  out  among  hundreds  as  a 
striking  individual  phenomenon.  Reavis  alone 
might  rival  him  in  power  of  producing  personal 
publicity  through  his  very  appearance,  both  also 
being  originally  newspaper  reporters,  as  well  as 
Nature's  own  self-reporters. 

Pulitzer,  it  may  be  averred,  was  professionally 
born  in  St.  Louis,  serving  here  his  earliest  appren- 
ticeship, and  rising  gradually  to  mastership,  which 
he  bore  with  him  to  New  York.  Thus  he  too  along 
with  many  others  fled  from  the  Great  Disillusion, 
when  he  had  found  it  out,  to  try  for  a  new  reality 
under  other  skies.  And  it  must  be  confessed  that 
he  more  fully  realized  himself  than  any  other  St. 
Louis  man  within  my  horizon,  except  possibly  the 
great  bridge-builder  Eads,  who  was  rightly  the 
Supreme  Pontiff  of  our  river  city. 


JOSEPH  PULITZER  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  163 

I  first  roundly  observed  Pulitzer  in  1868,  and  had 
a  brief  dialogue  with  him,  when  he  came  as  smooth- 
faced reporter  to  the  old  Central  High  School, 
where  I  was  a  teacher.  It  was  commencement  time 
for  us,  and  he  wished  to  drum  up  an  item  for  the 
German  Westliche  Post.  He  stepped  into  my  class- 
room unheralded,  which  was  his  right,  as  the  door 
stood  open  and  the  public  was  invited.  One  of  the 
girl-pupils  was  inclined  to  giggle,  as  she  saw  that 
tall  somewhat  grotesque  figure  with  large  goggle 
eyes  staring  through  big-rimmed  spectacles  at  us 
rather  quizzically ;  then  he  whipped  out  his  note- 
book, clutched  his  pencil,  and  somewhat  brokenly 
asked  me,  who  had  taken  my  seat  beside  him: 
"What  study  is  this?"  "Mental  Philosophy,"  I 
answered.  ' '  Philosophy,  eh ! "  Then  began  a  sur- 
prising drama  of  his  features  playing  on  his  face's 
stage  for  a  moment  his  whole  reactive  subjectivity. 
Serio-comic  was  the  interlude  as  I  gazed  at  it,  for 
it  had  as  its  most  prominent  and  most  versatile 
actor  a  huge  demonic  nose  gifted  with  a  language 
all  its  own,  yet  smitingly  universal.  He  gave  a 
strange  Mephistophelean  scowl,  and  grunted  out  in 
contempt,  I  thought:  "What  good  can  you  get 
from  that?"  "Some  knowledge  of  the  human 
mind,  we  hope  to  have  gained,"  I  replied;  "come, 
examine  us,  and  perhaps  you  will  be  kind  enough 
to  show  us  a  sample  of  your  own  mind."  From 
wide-open  eyes  through  huge  glasses  he  flung  a 
stare  which  made  us  all  wince  a  little.  Then  he  put 
up  his  note-book,  and  started  for  the  door.    I  fol- 


164  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

lowed,  saying :   ' '  Glad  to  know  you. ' '    His  curious 
reply  was :    "I  know  you  already. ' ' 

What  did  he  mean?  I  certainly  was  both  small 
and  obscure  in  the  city,  and  could  have  had  no  pub- 
lic standing.  So  I  am  led  to  theorize  now,  looking 
backwards:  Pulitzer  was  already  making  himself 
acquainted  with  every  little  current  in  town  and 
with  those  who  took  part  in  it;  even  the  private 
conduct  of  the  citizen  was  to  be  brought  under  his 
inspection.  He  was  getting  ready  for  his  new  Jour- 
nalism, which  is  to  know,  and  if  occasion  arise,  is  to 
expose  the  inner  life,  yea  the  under  life,  and  espe- 
cially the  double  life  of  each  public  man,  however 
minute,  even  that  of  the  ordinary  schoolmaster:  in 
which  function  his  newspaper  gave  me  the  shock  of 
my  life  by  its  exposure  of  our  High  School  Prin- 
cipal though  I  knew  not  a  little  before. 

I  have  ranked  Pulitzer  as  German,  though  he  was 
born  in  Hungary  of  a  Jewish  father  and  a  Chris- 
tian mother,  according  to  his  biographer.  What 
was  the  earliest  speech  lisped  by  the  child — Hunga- 
rian, German,  or  possibly  Iddish  ?  Not  told,  as  far 
as  I  know,  but  his  native  dialect  was  probably  Ger- 
man, which  was  also  the  language  in  which  he  re- 
ceived his  youthful  education.  In  St.  Louis  he 
started  as  a  German  reporter;  and  during  his  last 
hours,  as  narrated  by  his  biographer,  Mr.  Ireland, 
he  called  for  a  reading  in  German,  which  seems  to 
have  been  his  final  as  well  as  first  native  utterance. 
In  the  main  he  hired  his  English  written  for  him; 
his  newspaper's  opinion  and  policy  he  ruled  auto- 


JOSEPH  PULITZER  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  165 

cratically,  but  its  expression  he  bought  in  the  mar- 
ket; in  fact  he  selected  and  purchased  the  literary- 
style  he  wanted ;  then  he  ordered  to  be  put  into  it 
what  content  he  chose.  To  such  a  servitude  Jour- 
nalism is  reducing  Literature  as  the  once  indepen- 
dent self-expression  of  the  human  soul.  Herein, 
however,  Pultizer  showed  himself  the  coming  man 
of  Great  Newspaperdom  in  its  triumphant  evolu- 
tion ;  its  task  is  to  subject  to  its  own  autocracy  in- 
dependent Literature,  of  which,  I  may  here  auto- 
biographically  interject,  I  have  persisted  an  irre- 
ducible atom,  defiant  of  the  time's  behest,  and  hence 
wholly  negligible.  Still  even  thuswise  I  have  dared 
live  my  own  life. 

But  we  have  not  come  to  that  time  yet  in  his  ca- 
reer, he  is  still  the  young  reporter  barely  of  age. 
Note  him  as  he  marches  out  of  my  room ;  his  stride  is 
strikingly  aggressive,  he  knows  just  what  he  is  go- 
ing for  and  how  to  get  it  with  some  hurry.  In  every 
motion  he  pushes  out  as  a  man  of  prime  initiative, 
giving  a  kind  of  ideal  knock-down  to  any  obstacle. 
His  stay  was  brief  and  his  information  rather 
short ;  but  like  a  good  reporter,  he  can  make  up  the 
rest  of  the  article.  Probably  he  needed  only  that 
one  word  Philosophy  as  a  kind  of  cocoon  for  infi- 
nite repertorial  spinning. 

One  of  Pulitzer's  attractions  for  me  was  his  re- 
semblance, both  physical  and  spiritual  to  our  Brock- 
meyer  of  the  Philosophical  Society.  The  same  sort 
of  body,  lithe  but  heavy-muscled  and  strong-boned ; 


166  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

both  loomed  large  but  lissom  at  least  in  their 
younger  days,  yet  with  this  emphatic  difference: 
Pulitzer  seemed  always  on  the  spring,  ready  to 
pounce,  while  Brockmeyer  would  settle  back  at 
ease  in  his  chair,  cock  up  his  heels,  and  keep  wab- 
bling his  pipe  around  in  his  mouth  from  corner  to 
corner  in  a  perpetual  lazy  smoke.  But  their  most 
striking  visible  similarity  lay  in  their  weird  mobile 
physiognomy,  with  its  dramatic  play  ranging  from 
uncouth  grotesquery  to  perfervid  tragedy.  And 
right  at  the  heart  of  their  features  throbbed  and 
lifted  and  sported  the  towering  organ  of  Cyrano  de 
Bergerac. 

But  their  deeper  kinship  I  deemed  to  lie  in  that 
secret  elemental  power  often  called  Demonic,  but 
also  Angelic  or  even  Satanic,  namely  the  downflow 
of  upper  energy  which  takes  hold  of  the  man  for 
a  while  and  makes  him  greater  than  himself  as 
mere  individual  man.  Both  possessed,  I  believe 
this  unique  gift  of  genius,  each  in  his  own  way. 
But  just  here  rose  up  a  great  difference :  Brock- 
meyer never  trained  his  genius  to  do  its  work  but 
let  it  run  wild,  and  to  waste,  and  hence  he  has  left 
little  or  no  sign  of  his  gift ;  Pulitzer,  however,  har- 
nessed his  genius  in  the  first  place  to  his  pie-cart, 
and  tasked  it  to  the  topmost  so  that  he  left  behind 
himself  a  vast  fortune  as  well  as  a  great  work  done ; 
thus  he  realized  himself  at  his  highest.  So  here 
again  in  comparison,  Brockmeyer  stands  forth  as 
the  Great  Unrealized — a  colossal  potentiality,  a 
kind  of  Illusion  somewhat  like  his  own  dear  city  of 


JOSEPH  PULITZER  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  167 

St.  Louis;  while  Pulitzer  is  by  contrast  the  self- 
achieved  soul,  the  man  made  actual. 

Did  these  two  men,  kinned  deeply  in  a  common 
genius,  ever  find  each  other,  and  recognize  their 
joint  affinity  of  spirit  ?  The  fact  is,  the  first  appre- 
ciation of  Pulitzer  I  ever  heard  was  thundered  from 
the  lips  of  Brockmeyer,  who  on  a  time  suddenly 
erupted  in  one  of  his  Vesuvian  outbursts.  "That 
young  fellow  cinches  the  future:  they  think  be- 
cause he  trundles  about  with  himself  a  big  cob-nose, 
a  whopper  jaw,  and  bull-frog  eyes  that  he  has  no 
sense ;  but  I  tell  you,  he  possesses  greater  dialectical 
ability  than  all  of  them  put  together — I  know  it  for 
I  have  felt  it;  mark  me,  he  is  now  engaged  in  the 
making  of  a  greater  man  than  editor  Danzer,  or 
editor  Pretorius,  or  even  Schurz."  So  fulmined 
once  Brockmeyer  in  vivid  ejaculation,  meanwhile 
rising  to  his  feet  and  emphasizing  with  a  gesture 
that  unusual  locution  dialectical  ability,  laden  by 
him  with  a  still  more  unusual  meaning.  Evidently 
this  was  his  wording  of  Pulitzer's  peculiar  nascent 
gift,  which  he  had  detected,  doubtless  by  his  own 
cognate  endowment.  To  understand  the  foregoing 
we  must  remember  that  Pulitzer  never  could  win 
the  respect  of  those  high-toned  German  editors  who 
made  fun  of  him  while  exploiting  his  talent,  till  he 
set  up  for  himself  in  an  English  newspaper.  Nay, 
English-speaking  St.  Louis  never  would  accept 
Pulitzer,  though  it  bought  his  journal.  For  that 
matter,  it  never  accepted  Brockmeyer,  nor  me,  nor 
the  St.  Louis  Movement,  and  still  the  world  moves, 


168  THE  ST.  L0VI8  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

and  St.  Louis — let  the  reader  finish  the  sentence 
with  a  hopeful  benediction. 

On  the  other  hand,  I  happened  once  to  catch  a 
whiff    of    Pulitzer's    laudatory    exuberance    over 
Brockmeyer's  work  in  the  Missouri  Constitutional 
Convention  of  1875.     I  was  walking  with  Judge 
Woerner  on  a  hot  day ;  we  turned  in  to  take  a  cool 
sip  of  philosophic  Germany's  beverage    at    Tony 
Faust's,  when  Pulitzer  came  up  to  us  somewhenee 
out  of  the  beer-fragrance  of  that  worshipful  temple 
of  Gambrinus,  and  he  began  quite  an  oration  be- 
fore us,  whom  he  knew  to  be    sworn    friends     of 
Brockmeyer.     Of  course  the  speech  was  intended 
for  Woerner,  who  was  a  great  man  and  a  first  citi- 
zen, but  I  got  the  benefit,  too.    I  recognized  at  once 
a  number  of  Brockmeyer's  political  thoughts  as  well 
as  some  of  his  thunderous  words  and  drastic  illus- 
trations.   And  the  profanity  was  not  wholly  omit- 
ted.    But  just  behold!     Brockmeyer's    look    and 
stature !  his  grimaces  and  Rabelaisian  grotesquery, 
followed  by  serious  long-faced  statements  of  pro- 
found constitutional  principles!     Then  his  smiling 
urbanity  toward  everybody,  and  especially  a  chiv- 
alrous courtesy  for  the  Southern  members  of  the 
Convention.    In  short,  Pulitzer  became  Brockmeyer 
then  and  there,  and  rehearsed    the   whole    lesson 
which  he  had  gotten  from  the  Convention,  for  of  it 
he  too  was  a  member.     He,  like  me,  though  in  a 
wholly  different  department  of  lore,  had  gone  to 
school  to  Brockmeyer  and  had  learned  somewhat, 
even  down  to  (or  rather  up  to)  his  peculiar  scream- 


JOSEPH  PULITZER  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  169 

like  vociferation,  when  becoming  a  little  eruptive. 
That  was  at  least  my  view  on  hearing  his  discourse, 
though  he  might  not  have  thought  so  himself. 

Thus  Pulitzer,  in  spite  of  himself,  took  up  into 
his  composition  a  strain  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement, 
of  whose  training  he  was  probably  unconscious.  But 
that  secret  subtle  demiurge  Brockmeyer  laid  his 
spell  upon  the  young  receptive  genius — there  being 
some  twenty  years  of  life-experience  between  their 
ages.  Pulitzer  quit  his  own  political  party  and 
finally  joined  that  of  Brockmeyer,  where  he  stayed 
for  the  rest  of  his  life.  I  heard  Brockmeyer  claim 
(I  know  nothing  of  the  matter  myself)  that  through 
his  influence  Pulitzer  was  appointed  Police  Com- 
missioner, by  which  office  the  latter  won  power, 
knowledge,  and  money,  wherewith  he  could  start  his 
independent  newspaper  career. 

Pulitzer,  however,  never  showed  any  turn,  as  far 
as  I  am  aware,  for  Brockmeyer 's  other  supreme  en- 
dowment: Philosophy,  which  was  the  passion  of 
Harris  and  of  the  rest  of  us.  The  immediate  sense- 
world  of  politics  and  city-life  was  his  chosen  ele- 
ment, being  the  prime  material  for  journalism,  in 
which  he  must  have  already  felt  his  great  career 
throbbing  towards  fulfilment.  In  1883  he  quit  St. 
Louis  for  New  York,  after  a  stay  of  some  seven- 
teen years.  He  chafed  against  his  journalistic  lim- 
its on  this  ever-narrowing  spot,  and  longed  to  get 
away  from  his  past,  so  as  to  start  over  again. 

Can  we  delve  to  the  ground  of  his  unsurpassed 
achievement,  genuine  I  hold,  and  so  far  still  endur- 


170  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

ing  ?  He  picked  up  at  once  that  orphaned  bankrupt 
sheet,  The  New  York  World,  and  tossed  it  to  the 
front  of  all  newspaperdom,  keeping  the  lead  as  long 
as  he  lived,  even  when  blind.  How  did  he  do  it? 
Barring  the  advertisements  which  are  but  an  echo 
of  its  circulation,  Pulitzer's  World  represented  and 
exposed  in  the  most  glaring  form  the  inherent  dual- 
isim  which  exists  at  its  deepest  in  New  York  City, 
and  in  the  Democratic  Party,  but  is  found  also  in 
American  life  everywhere.  The  editorial  page  fa- 
vored all  good  things,  attacked  corruption  of  every 
sort,  and  preached  the  ethics  of  public  and  private 
conduct  with  an  unction  which  smelt  of  sanctity — 
and  I  believe  the  man  was  honest.  But  now  look  on 
the  other  page,  the  repertorial — there  is  a  drop 
from  Heaven  to  Hell.  All  devildom  is  there  set 
forth  in  huge  black  head-lines,  propped  on  columns 
of  lurid  details  in  smaller  type — murders,  rapes, 
lynchings,  frauds,  seductions — Pandemonium  broke 
loose  in  print  and  served  up  for  breakfast.  So  the 
World  dualized  humanity  to  the  very  bottom  in 
every  issue,  compounding  Dante's  Inferno  and 
Paradiso  in  one  all-embracing  dose,  giving  each 
half  of  Human  Nature  and  of  God's  Universe  its 
due  representation  in  a  single  budget  every  day. 

Thus  Pulitzer  reflected  in  his  dual  newspaper  the 
Creation's  own  dualism  into  good  and  evil,  and 
therein  hit  off  an  image  of  the  dual  personality  of 
the  folk  and  its  democracy.  "Horribly  ugly  pic- 
ture, and  two-faced ' '  says  the  folk  looking  at  itself, 
' '  but  on  the  whole  it  is  true ;  yes,  it  is  I  myself  and 


JOSEPH  PULITZER  OF  ST.  LOUIS.  171 

none  other,  and  I  '11  buy  it. "  So  we  witness  a  Klon- 
dike stream  of  gold  pouring  suddenly  into  the  hith- 
erto empty  treasury  of  a  dying  newspaper.  Most 
wonderful  feat  of  hoary  magic  alchemy  turned  to 
literal  present  fact !  The  magician  seized  that  lit- 
tle old  moribund  World  and  recreated  it  out  of  two 
new  living  Worlds,  namely  the  Overworld  and  the 
Underworld  of  Human  Existence.  He  clapped  the 
halves  of  life  together  into  a  new  visible  work  of 
art,  and  made  them  appear  one  vast  bi-lateral  or- 
ganism, full  of  young  energy.  Call  it  the  earth's 
new-born  monster  if  you  will,  perchance  it  is  the 
old  Egyptian  Sphinx,  half  man  half  animal,  pro- 
pounding still  its  riddle,  rejuvenated  as  the  mod- 
ern Newspaper,  half  human  half  bestial.  Is  that  to 
be  our  last  huge  Literary  Megatherium,  which  is 
actually  now  swallowing  all  other  Literary  Forms 
of  prose  and  poetry,  as  being  inadequate,  worn-out, 
and  indeed  quite  exanimate?  Let  the  question 
stand,  for  it  comes  up  again  and  again  in  the  course 
of  this  petty  narrative  of  ours,  as  well  as  in  Uni- 
versal History. 

On  account  of  such  newspaper  duality,  or  if  you 
please,  duplicity,  many  people  and  not  a  few  of  his 
fellow-guildsmen  have  maintained  that  Pulitzer 
was  unprincipled,  Machiavellian,  in  fine  a  down- 
right hypocrite.  I  do  not  construe  him  thus;  he 
was  honest,  bitterly  honest  just  in  his  dualism,  and 
because  of  its  depth  and  mightiness  in  his  soul.  He 
carried  it  out  in  his  deed  to  the  last  consequence, 
and  he  could  not  have  done  that  without  its  being 


172  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

his  deepest  character  and  conviction.  In  fact  Pul- 
itzer was  himself  the  journalistic  dualism  incarnate 
and  he  possessed  the  genius  to  fling  it  out  of  him- 
self into  his  World,  whose  very  name  turns  double 
in  meaning  through  his  presence.  His  internal  life 
ran  two-fold  probably  (for  we  have  not  his  auto- 
biography) ;  his  outer  life  also  seems  cut  in  two-, 
the  first  part  was  his  long  St.  Louis  apprentice- 
ship, the  formative  experience  sprung  of  the  Great 
Illusion,  which  he  at  last  pricked  and  fled  from; 
the  second  part  was  his  New  York  time,  that  of 
realization,  lasting  more  than  a  quarter  of  a  cen- 
tury. 

Pulitzer  himself  thought  that  his  repertorial 
page,  the  bestial  body  of  his  Sphinx,  needed  de- 
fence, or  at  least  some  explanation.  Biographer 
Ireland  broaches  the  topic  repeatedly,  giving  opin- 
ions from  headquarters.  He  also  intimates  that 
Pulitzer  at  times  entertained  the  idea  of  writing 
his  autobiography,  possibly  incited  by  the  example 
of  Schurz.  That  would  have  been,  if  open-heart- 
edly  confessed,  a  very  significant  American  docu- 
ment. But  Pulitzer  had  his  secrets  and  kept  them, 
nay  he  could  fabricate  and  play  off  his  mystifica- 
tions when  he  needed  them.  Would  he  throw  open 
to  daylight  his  hidden  St.  Louis  career?  But  Pul- 
itzer really  did  not  care  to  write  an  eternal  book, 
as  did  Schurz.  He  felt,  I  think,  rather  a  contempt 
for  Literature  as  such ;  he  had  bought  too  much  of 
it  for  his  own  ephemeral  ends  to  esteem  highly  or 
to  believe  profoundly  in  the  eternal  record  of  the 


JOSEPH  PULITZER  OF  ST.  LOVIS.  173 

Eternal.  Writ  could  only  be  a  purchasable  jour- 
nalistic means  with  him,  not  an  end  for  its  own 
sake  in  human  self-expression.  So  there  is  no  auto- 
biography of  his,  at  least  up  to  date. 

Again  St.  Louis  lost  in  him  a  great  man,  who 
had  the  insight  and  the  power  to  seize  and  to  ex- 
ploit more  fully  than  ever  before  the  possibilities 
of  the  mighty  social  weapon,  the  Newspaper.  In- 
deed his  success  called  up  in  many  minds  the  an- 
xious query :  Is  this  possible  monster,  now  nobly 
named  by  itself  the  Freedom  of  the  Press,  to  be 
subject  to  no  law  except  its  own  impersonal  un- 
conscienced  conscience,  or  perchance  except  the 
weak  statute  of  libel,  which  Pulitzer  openly  boasted 
he  had  the  means  of  turning  against  the  person 
who  might  invoke  it  against  him  in  a  court  of  jus- 
tice? Are  the  great  Pulitzers  of  Journalism  to  re- 
main autocratic  and  irresponsible,  while  all  man- 
kind is  subjecting  Emperors,  Kings,  Presidents, 
Governors,  and  Mayors  to  the  rule  of  a  self-deter- 
mined institutional  order?     The  problem  is  rising. 

But  after  such  troubled  premonitions,  we  always 
come  back  to  appreciate  the  marvelous  achievement, 
despite  Fate's  furious  envy,  of  the  man  with  his 
dual  personality  realized  so  colossally  in  a  deed. 
And  quite  at  his  greatest  he  wrought  during  twen- 
ty-four years  of  blindness !  Is  he  then  our  modern 
sightless  Milton  or  Homer,  the  new  sort  of  blind 
maker  or  poet  of  the  new  Iliad?  Pulitzer  must 
have  known  how  to  select  the  human  instruments 
for  his  definite  ends  better  than  any  other  seeing 


174  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

newspaper  Napoleon.  And  still  after  his  death,  his 
constructive  power  runs  on  in  his  work  with  a 
sort  of  perpetuity.  That  which  is  most  ephemeral 
on  this  earth  (the  newspaper)  he  makes  eternal 
just  in  its  ephemerality.  Has  he  not  kept  his  soul 
immortal  and  active  even  after  his  physical  evan- 
ishment?  It  looks  as  if  he  has  created  a  new  and 
lasting  body  for  his  departed  spirit,  as  we  may 
call  it  tentatively  as  yet.  But  as  for  me,  after  all 
his  drawbacks,  I  like  best  to  contemplate  his  best, 
which  is  to  my  mind  that  he  keeps  on  proving 
through  time  the  immortality  of  his  own  soul. 

And  finally  I  have  to  repeat  to  myself  that  here 
is  a  man  who  has  realized  himself  more  completely 
than  any  other  striver  within  my  speaking  or  read- 
ing knowledge,  in  spite  of  Nature's  most  heinous 
handicaps,  with  one  possible  supreme  exception. 
Let  my  reader  guess,  Who  1  Only  let  him  not  take 
himself  as  this  exception,  nor  myself. 

IV 

A  Book  Writer's  Life  Lines 

The  German  Era  of  St.  Louis  graved  upon  me 
certain  life-lines,  which  have  continued  to  run 
through  my  whole  career  down  to  the  present.  I 
then  found  out  with  some  distinctness  what  I  was 
to  do  in  this  earthly  sojourn  of  mine,  and  how  I 
was  to  do  it,  and  I  made  the  beginning.  Still  more 
decisively  I  discovered  what  I  was  not  to  do,  and 
marked  with  clearness  the  limits  of  what  I  had  to 


A  BOOK  WRITER'S  LIFE  LINES.  175 

escape,  if  I  was  ever  to  get  anything  done.  This 
negative  task,  that  of  avoiding  dissipation  of  energy- 
was  for  me  one  of  the  hardest,  as  I  loved  exceed- 
ingly to  wander  at  mind's  random  through  the 
Elysian  Fields  of  omniscience,  and  to  spread  me 
out  over  them  to  a  vanishing  thinness.  Nature's 
indolence  found  in  the  periodicalism  of  the  time  the 
supreme  temptation  to  a  dissolved,  that  is,  disso- 
lute mental  existence.  What  strength  I  had,  hardly 
more  than  that  of  a  half-man,  I  kept  me  under 
strict  training  to  concentrate  and  to  organize.  After 
many  lapses  and  relapses  I  would  gather  up  the 
pieces  of  myself,  and  penitently  start  again  to 
build  life's  tabernacle. 

Can  I  give  some  vague  notion  concerning  this 
German  Era  of  St.  Louis  which  took  part  in  my 
very  self-hood  and  its  coming  evolution  ?  I  sought 
to  know  and  to  feel  the  beat  of  the  old  Fatherland's 
folk-soul  which  I  then  deemed  quite  the  Earth- 
soul,  everywhere  around  me,  to  share  its  thoughts, 
its  amusements,  its  speech,  even  its  prejudices.  But 
all  this  effort  was  hardly  for  its  own  sake,  even  if  I 
wildly  enjoyed  the  novel  experience;  I  was  more 
or  less  conscious  of  another  and  higher  end:  I 
sought  to  know  and  to  commune  with  the  Genius 
of  the  Age  which  had  at  its  best  embodied  itself  in 
a  trinity  of  great  Teutonic  souls — the  philosopher 
Hegel,  the  poet  Goethe,  the  musician  Beethoven. 
There  was  the  time's  consensus  that  the  nineteenth 
Century,  yea  all  the  Centuries  at  least  since  Shakes- 
peare, had  found  their  highest  cultural  expression 


176  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

in  the  works  of  these  three  Germans,  and  my  pre- 
sent call  was  to  make  mine  this  sovereign  discipline 
of  the  period.  So  I  became  a  student  in  the  Uni- 
versity of  Civilization,  highest  of  all  Universities. 
In  other  words  I  was  now  to  get  acquainted  with 
the  World-Spirit,  the  supernal  Power  over  History, 
in  its  three  latest  grandest  incarnations  manifest- 
ing and  voicing  its  message  to  us  earth-dwellers 
here  below.  So  during  these  years  I  especially 
studied  Hegel,  Goethe,  Beethoven,  separately  and 
together,  all  of  them  being  at  last  one  mighty  co- 
temporaneous  utterance  of  the  Age's  Genius,  who 
then  spoke  German.  Thus  the  German  Era  of  St. 
Louis  gave  me  my  flood-tidal  opportunity,  furnish- 
ing incentive  and  harmonious  environment,  as  well 
as  the  native  speech  of  the  soul  universal  of  the  Cen- 
tury.   How  otherwise  just  now ! 

Then  let  it  be  confessed  that  I  was  whirled  along 
on  top  of  the  surge,  and  I  jubilated  to  the  height 
of  my  mood,  echoing  the  new  hope,  which  especially 
attuned  itself  to  music.  My  house  became  a  little 
center  of  melodies  instrumental  and  vocal,  in  which 
I  took  practical  part,  and  I  reached  the  point  of 
playing  a  flute  in  the  city  orchestra — an  experience 
which  inducted  me  into  the  sound-painted  temple 
of  the  Tone-God,  where  I  could  hear  all  the  finest 
concordances  of  the  Earth.  From  this  harmonious 
time  a  musical  accompaniment  has  kept  singing  un- 
derneath all  my  unmusical  days,  often  breaking  up 
to  the  surface  in  some  form  of  poetic  expression. 
The  Marsellaise  refused  to  hymn  me  any  longer, 


A  BOOK  WRITER'S  LIFE  LINES.  177 

while  heavy-throated  the  Wacht  am  Rhein  rose  in 
exultant  sound-waves  over  the  city. 

Still  I  had  now  and  then  a  pulsation  of  doubt.  I 
recollect  that  I  questioned  especially  the  annexa- 
tion of  Alsace-Lorraine,  the  fatuous  act  of  the 
Franco-Prussian  War  (1870).  I  had  read  enough 
of  history  to  feel  the  nemesis  of  such  a  deed,  in 
whose  sweep  nationality,  seeking  to  assert  itself, 
was  really  contradicting  itself,  to  its  own  self-un- 
doing. Such  an  old  claim,  if  carried  out  univer- 
sally, would  tear  Europe  to  pieces.  In  a  company 
of  friendly  Germans  I  once  expressed  this  view, 
when  they  turned  on  me  with  angry  reproaches, 
and  almost  mobbed  me.  The  time's  Illusion  in 
them  I  did  not  then  perceive,  though  it  gave  me  a 
smart  tweak  of  the  nose  in  secret  irony. 

Through  my  devotion  to  these  three  spiritual 
sovereigns  of  the  age  and  their  similars,  my  work 
broke  into  two  life-lines ;  in  other  words  I  had  two 
vocations,  the  first  of  which  nourished  my  body, 
the  second  my  spirit.  That  is,  I  earned  my  bread 
by  my  professional  business,  school-teaching;  but 
my  labor  of  self-development  and  self-expression 
had  to  be  its  own  reward.  Thus  two  vocational 
strands  arose  and  intertwined  themselves  through 
all  my  years,  the  remunerative  and  the  unremuner- 
ative;  my  highest  work  brought  no  pay,  only  ex- 
pense ;  indeed  I  became  unwilling  and  unable  to 
sell  my  best  self  for  a  price.  It  is  true  that  I  tried 
to  make  these  higher  studies  react  favorably  upon 
the  daily  routine  of  the  humble  instructor ;  in  fact, 


178  THE  ST-  L0UIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

my  theory  was  and  still  is  that  the  deadly  me- 
chanics of  the  school-room  can  only  thus  be  raised 
into  living  reality;  that  the  teacher,  to  be  at  his 
best,  must  have  his  own  private  universal  dis- 
cipline perpetually  overflowing  into  the  particular 
official  task  of  the  day.  So  there  was  developed  in 
my  life  what  I  may  call  my  Super-vocation  distinct 
from  yet  inter-wound  with  my  vocation  proper, 
which  also  had  its  distinctive  training. 

I  was  not  yet  a  writer  of  books  except  in  a  very 
small  tentative  way.  But  already  some  such  goal 
of  my  endeavor  seemed  to  be  looming  up  dimly  in 
the  distance.  More  or  less  consciously  I  began  to 
throw  off  all  encumbrances  to  such  a  pursuit.  Ex- 
perience was  first  to  give  me  her  lesson  as  to  what 
might  favor  or  hinder ;  then  I  was  to  act  if  I  had 
the  will  power.  During  these  years  I  was  brought 
face  to  face  with  several  questions  of  future  des- 
tiny, to  which  I  had  to  give  decisive  practical  an- 
swers. I  had  to  make  choice  of  my  life-lines,  going 
this  way,  shunning  that;  in  other  words  the  time 
had  come  upon  me  when  I  was  to  select  not  only 
my  vocation  but  my  Super-vocation,  as  I  now  bap- 
tize it,  the  most  difficult  move  in  life,  often  never 
taken  and  often  never  even  known. 

1.  One  of  my  first  renunciations  was  that  of 
professional  promotion.  All  of  us  teachers  were 
supposed  to  be  in  line  of  advancement  whose  high- 
est goal  was  the  official  headship  of  the  whole  school 
system.  One  day  a  bolt  of  lightning  fell  at  my  feet 
in  the  shape  of  an  offer  to  be  Assistant  Superin- 


A  BOOK  WRITER'S  LIFE  LINES.  179 

tendant,  a  position  next  to  the  highest.  I  did  not 
try  to  pick  it  up,  but  declined  the  for  me  dangerous 
task;  I  knew  it  would  be  the  end  of  my  Super- 
vocation  which  had  become  already  my  upper,  and 
perchance  my  saving  life-line.  I  was  close  enough 
to  Superintendent  Harris  to  see  and  partly  to  share 
the  vexations  of  his  high  position ;  perhaps  I  may 
have  caused  him  one  or  two  myself.  Administra- 
tion, in  return  for  its  pile  of  gold,  would  demand 
the  sacrifice  of  my  creative  power;  and  I  was  de- 
termined not  to  commit  that  sin  of  simony  against 
my  Holy  Ghost. 

So  I  resolved  to  forego  all  administrative  work, 
and  I  have  pushed  that  resolution  ahead  of  me 
through  half  a  century.  But  in  such  a  purpose  I 
had  to  relinquish  the  prizes  of  the  world,  which  are 
all,  or  nearly  all,  given  to  the  administrator — the 
glittering  prizes  of  money,  fame,  power.  I  de- 
serve no  pitying  commiseration,  since  I  made  my 
choice  consciously,  and  have  persevered  in  it  with 
eyes  open.  For  along  with  the  glories  I  escaped 
the  horrors  of  Administration,  to  pursue  and  to 
realize  by  peaceful  development  my  Super-vocation 
in  the  company  of  Chum  Poverty  who  has  always 
kindly,  though  sparingly  allotted  me  food,  raiment 
and  shelter. 

2.  An  unimportant  paragraph  I  may  here  de- 
vote to  a  brief  interlude  of  this  time,  during  which 
I  saw  somewhat — not  much — of  that  peculiar  time- 
killing  bauble  known  as  general  and  even  genteel 
society.     A  few  prominent  college  men  came  to- 


180  THE  ST.  LOUTS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

gether  and  formed  an  organization  which  was  bap- 
tized under  the  name  of  the  University  Club.  I 
happened  to  be  present  at  the  first  meeting,  and  we 
all  pledged  our  best  assistance  to  the  enterprise, 
which  was  successful  in  bringing  together  a  con- 
siderable number  of  the  educated  people  of  the 
city,  lawyers,  doctors,  ministers,  teachers,  business 
men.  Thomas  Allen,  an  eminent  and  wealthy  citi- 
zen, head  of  the  Iron  Mountain  Railroad,  we  chose 
as  our  first  President,  who  plumped  into  our  lucky 
treasury  a  thousand  dollars  for  a  start.  Social  en- 
tertainments were  frequent,  lecture  courses  were 
given,  receptions  for  distinguished  visitors  were 
held,  eating  and  drinking  were  not  neglected. 

During  two  years  or  so  I  was  an  active  club-mem- 
ber, for  the  first  and  last  time  in  my  life.  I  saw  a 
good  deal  of  certain  high-placed  urban  characters, 
and  heard  them  speak  out  in  conversation  as  well 
as  in  oration.  On  the  whole  it  was  a  new  kind  of 
humanity  in  my  experience,  and  I  drew  much  en- 
joyment, and  I  think  profit,  from  the  intercourse. 
Our  two  chief  philosophers,  Brockmeyer  and  Har- 
ris, were  not  members,  still  there  was  a  little  sprink- 
ling of  us  in  the  Club,  and  a  subtle  streak  of  Hegel- 
ism  would  occasionally  flash  out  to  the  bewilder- 
ment of  the  Philistines,  who  were  the  large  ma- 
jority. I  even  started  little  talks  off  in  a  cosy  cor- 
ner on  Shakespeare,  with  whose  excellence  I  was 
at  that  time  overflowing  verbally  if  not  mentally. 
I  begged  Harris  to  join  us — Brockmeyer  was  im- 
possible^— and  we  would  start  a  hot  campaign,  for 


A  BOOK  WRITER'S  LIFE  LINES.  181 

which  I  thought  there  was  a  unique  opportunity- 
But  he  would  not,  giving  some  poor  open  excuses, 
and  hiding  his  real  decisive  reasons  as  he  often  did. 
His  heart  he  never  wore  upon  his  sleeve  for  daws 
(like  me)  to  peck  at. 

At  last  in  1874,  the  blow  of  fate  smote  me  with 
a  great  domestic  loss,  which  simply  snuffed  out  all 
pleasure  in  pleasure,  and  wilted  to  sorrow  life's 
ambitions.  I  gradually  withdrew  from  the  Univer- 
sity Club  and  never  re-joined.  Twice  afterwards, 
once  in  New  York  and  once  in  Chicago,  I  took  a 
little  nip  of  Club-life,  but  soon  flung  away  the 
cup  as  alien  to  my  work  and  to  my  character.  So 
I  lost  my  gift  of  comradery — I  could  never  have 
had  much ;  but  for  this  little  while  at  the  Univer- 
sity 'Club  I  was  fairly  sociable,  never  again.  This 
must  be  accounted  one  of  life's  drawbacks,  from 
which,  however,  I  gathered,  as  I  believe,  a  consid- 
erable blessing  for  my  Super-vocation. 

3.  Every  teacher  thinks  of  changing  his  voca- 
tion, or  at  least  he  used  to  think  so  in  my  time.  The 
prizes  were  on  the  whole  smaller  than  in  other  pro- 
fessions; the  social  prestige  was  the  least.  Hence 
teaching  was  accepted  as  a  kind  of  half-way  house 
on  the  road  to  something  higher.  In  my  early  peda- 
gogical environment,  the  better  half  of  the  more 
ambitious  young  men  were  studying  law  for  the 
future.  We  had  a  class  in  Blackstone  made  up  of 
teachers.  Since  then  the  professional  spirit  of  the 
teaching  masses  has  doubtless  improved;  but  the 


182  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

chance  of  escape,  when  once  in  the  mill,  has  be- 
come less. 

I  was  one  of  those  who  began  to  teach  school  till 
I  could  move  out  of  such  an  intermediate  condition 
into  the  legal  profession.  The  temptation  still 
hung  over  me  when  I  entered  the  High  School. 
Judge  Woerner,  then  a  practising  attorney,  of  his 
own  friendly  accord  once  offered  me  a  starter's 
position  in  his  office  with  a  small  salary.  At  home 
the  household  queen  urged  me  boldly  to  accept,  and 
offered  herself  as  a  living  or  rather  starving  sacri- 
fice to  a  diminished  income,  already  small  enough. 
Then  beside  her  lay  a  babe  in  the  cradle,  whose 
smile  became  my  very  enigmatic  oracle.  For  many  a 
month  I  stood  at  the  crossroads  staring  at  the  two 
sign-boards  which  pointed  in  such  different  direc- 
tions, and  I  tarried  will-lessly  interrogating  the 
Future.  At  last  the  Future  suddenly  turned  and 
interrogated  me  sternly :  ' '  Are  you  willing  to  give 
up  your  Super-vocation,  which  now  runs  along 
peacefully  with,  yet  above  your  vocation?"  No, 
was  the  answer,  and  that  upper  life-line  of  mine 
has  sped  on  its  way  unswerving  till  now,  while  I 
have  remained  militant  pedagogue  in  the  battle 
against  the  fates  of  physical  existence. 

4.  Another  phenomenon  peculiar  to  this  time 
was  the  large  number  of  magazines  which  sprang 
up  mushroom-like,  throughout  the  city.  How  many, 
I  cannot  tell ;  but  in  my  immediate  vicinage  I  may 
count  four  with  which  the  St.  Louis  Movement  had 
some  connection.     The  ground  for  this  frantic  but 


A  BOOK  WRITER'S  LIFE  LINES.  183 

evanescent  growth  of  periodicalism,  as  I  look  back 
at  it,  lay  in  the  intoxicating  draught  of  the  Great 
Illusion,  whereof  we  all  were  guzzling  to  the  last 
drop.  I  reveled  in  the  drunken  dream,  and  so  did 
everybody  else  in  town,  that  ours  was  to  be  the 
Future  Great  City  of  the  World,  and  hence  there 
must  arise  just  here  the  Future  Great  Magazine  of 
the  World.  Thus  took  place  a  kind  of  rush  to  be 
first  in  the  new  field,  like  the  flood  of  eager  settlers 
racing  to  pre-empt  some  vacant  rich  territory.  An- 
other Illusion  by  the  way. 

Perhaps  the  best  sample  of  this  fresh  outbreak 
of  illusory  St.  Louis  was  The  Inland  Magazine, 
edited  by  Charlotte  Smith,  though  people  gener- 
ally supposed  that  Reavis  and  his  Idea  were  the 
secret  mainspring  of  the  enterprise.  Certainly  he 
wrote  for  it,  and  now  we  had  an  organ  of  the  Gos- 
pel according  to  St.  Louis  (the  American  Saint 
not  the  French),  which  was  to  be  propagated  over 
the  earth  from  its  right  center  through  the  words 
of  the  prophet  himself.  Moreover  Reavis  was  be- 
ginning to  look  to  a  new  field  of  activity,  for  he 
says  in  one  of  his  final  prefaces,  "this  pamphlet  is 
to  be  the  last  which  I  shall  prepare  and  publish 
upon  the  material  interest  of  the  country  and  St. 
Louis. ' '  What  can  he  mean  ?  Is  he  getting  a  first 
stroke  or  glimpse  of  the  coming  Disillusion?  He 
gives  us  a  glimmer  of  his  fresh  task,  "wherein  the 
great  problems  of  the  world  are  to  be  solved  and 
man's  highest  life  on  earth  is  to  be  attained."  Is 
Reavis  then  going  to  turn  philosopher,  and  join 


184  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

the  St.  Louis  Movement  ?  He  never  did,  as  far  as 
I  know,  even  if  he  once  asked  Harris  to  lecture  for 
him  on  immortality.  His  object  is  now,  as  he  says, 
"moral  and  intellectual  development,"  seemingly 
quite  distinct  from  his  former  glorification  of  "ma- 
terial St.  Louis,"  for  which  he  had  coined  a  sort 
of  universal  cognomen  "The  Future  Great" — this 
short  cut  becoming  for  a  while  our  city's  abbrevia- 
tion at  home  and  abroad.  At  any  rate  The  Inland 
had  a  perceptible  tincture  of  Reavisism,  and  so  did 
our  newspapers  as  well  as  ourselves.  Still  it  con- 
tained something  else,  whereof  I  can  recall  one 
rememberable  instance :  this  magazine  first  showed 
me  to  myself  poetically  in  St.  Louis  type,  having 
printed  in  its  columns  my  youthful  drama  Clar- 
ence, which  Reavis  had  heard  of  and  asked  for 
through  Harris.  Thus  it  started  my  little  cataract 
of  printer's  ink,  which  even  in  book-quenching  St. 
Louis,  has  continued  its  downpour  into  this  year, 
and  into  this  book. 

Of  the  Journal  of  Speculative  Philosophy,  found- 
ed by  Harris  during  this  same  Era,  I  have  already 
spoken.  I  contributed  first  to  it  some  translations 
from  the  German,  and  then  my  early  Shakespeare 
articles.  At  the  start  it  had  the  unique  character 
of  being  the  only  magazine  of  the  kind  published 
in  the  English  language.  I  desired  to  help  Harris 
in  his  daring  enterprise,  and  so  I  kept  on  writing 
and  printing  my  Shakespearian  essays  till  a  book 
had  evolved,  and  pathetically  begged  me  for  pub- 
lication.   I  took  pity  on  its  distressed  fragmentary 


A  BOOK  WRITER'S  LIFE  LINES.  185 

condition  and  yielded.  The  Journal  was  continued 
for  many  years  and  won  a  name.  Harris  clung  to 
it  through  life,  or  nearly  so,  and  it  must  be  deemed 
his  means  or  form  of  self-expression.  It  remains 
his  monumental  work;  he  spent  a  good  deal  of  the 
best  energy  of  his  best  days  upon  its  exacting  re- 
quirements. I  could  never  be  reconciled  to  giving 
my  creative  moments  for  such  a  result;  thus  our 
life-lines  ran  different.  As  this  Journal  was  more 
or  less  interwoven  with  the  St.  Louis  Movement  to 
its  last  number,  it  will  be  mentioned  repeatedly  in 
our  narrative.  I  may  call  this,  together  with  his 
other  philosophical  work,  the  Super-vocation  of 
Harris,  kept  up  at  a  great  unpaid  and  unpayable 
outlay  of  money  and  mind,  alongside  of  his  bread- 
winning  vocation,  which,  however,  it  deeply  in- 
fluenced. 

A  school  periodical  called  The  American  Journal 
of  Education,  edited  by  Major  Merwin,  was  an- 
other journalistic  offshoot  of  this  Era,  which  had 
its  link  of  connection  with  the  St.  Louis  Movement 
through  Harris  and  other  local  educators  and  writ- 
ers. I  do  not  remember  furnishing  to  it  any  direct 
contribution,  though  it  reviewed  sympathetically 
a  number  of  my  productions. 

But  the  magazine  with  which  I  stood  in  most  in- 
timate personal  relation,  and  out  of  which  I  drew 
a  hot  living  experience  of  periodicalism  was  The 
Western,  which,  starting  as  pedagogical,  rose  to  be 
mainly  literary.  On  the  whole  it  had  a  very  shift- 
ing and  at  times  shiftless  history  through  its  many 


18$  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

tetering  ups  and  downs.  My  chief  part  I  have  not 
forgotten:  I  took  a  pledge  to  furnish  an  article 
for  every  number,  and  at  the  same  time  to  pay 
five  or  possibly  ten  dollars  into  the  magazine's  ever- 
gaping  treasury  for  my  own  article.  An  ambitious 
literary  lady  once  asked  me  how  much  I  received 
for  my  contribution,  and  she  intimated  that  she 
had  something  of  the  sort  for  sale,  if  she  could 
get  a  better  price  for  it  here  than  in  the  East.  My 
rejoinder  must  have  run  somehow  thus:  "We 
writers  here  in  St.  Louis  are  far  ahead  of  all  others 
known  to  the  World 's  History  in  ability,  for  we  are 
not  only  able  to  write  articles,  but  also  to  pay  a 
good  price  for  them  when  written.  Such  are  the 
terms,  if  you  wish  to  join  our  guild."  She  de- 
clined becoming  a  member,  with  the  modest  state- 
ment:   "I  own  no  such  ability  as  that." 

During  this  stage  of  The  Western  (for  it  had 
several  other  stages),  lasting  possibly  a  year,  we 
the  contributors,  also  courteously  called  stockhold- 
ers, were  likewise  the  editors  in  a  kind  of  common 
parley,  which  settled  the  affairs  of  the  publication. 
Thus  I  came  to  experience  somewhat  of  the  nature 
of  Magazinism  and  its  rewards,  which  I  slowly 
made  up  my  mind  to  forego  in  this  life.  There 
certainly  was  need  of  unity  in  the  conduct  of  the 
business,  and  finally  I  was  chosen  editor.  I  de- 
clined the  honor  with  becoming  modesty,  I  thought, 
when  an  attempt  was  made  to  foist  the  office  upon 
me  anyhow.  But  I  stamped  No  with  decision,  and 
the  editorship  went  elsewhere,  and  at  the  same  time 


A  BOOK  WRITER'S  LIFE  LINES.  187 

my  direct  connection  not  only  with  the  Western, 
but  also  with  the  vast  and  ever-growing  magazine- 
world  closed  for  good.  I  never  afterwards  took 
part  in  periodical  literature,  though  I  have  occa- 
sionally sent  articles  and  a  little  cash  in  response  to 
the  editorial  cry  of  pain  such  as  I  used  to  hear  in 
the  sanctum  of  The  Western:  "More  copy,  more 
money. ' ' 

Thus  during  this  German  Era  and  through  its 
peculiar  opportunities  I  developed  my  two  most 
strongly  marked  and  permanent  life-lines — the  up- 
per and  the  lower,  the  ideal  and  the  real,  the 
moneyless  and  the  moneyed,  and  so  on  through  a 
long  string  of  dualisms.  The  name  for  the  first  I 
have  already  minted  as  my  Super-vocation,  self-re- 
warding, self-contained,  self-sufficing,  whose  chief 
function  was  to  bring  me  into  some  closer  contact 
or  clearer  vision  of  my  supernal  acquaintance,  who 
to  my  mind  bears  the  lofty  title  of  World-Spirit. 

And  I  may  add  that  this  for  me  exalted  com- 
munion began,  during  the  present  Era,  to  insist 
upon  some  kind  of  utterance  in  my  native  speech. 
What  I  had  gained  I  was  driven  to  express  for  my- 
self, and  then  to  give  away  to  others.  Thus  a 
secret  impulse  started  in  me  toward  becoming  a 
Writer  of  Books,  the  goal  and  the  fulfilment  of  my 
Super-vocation. 


188  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 


The  Book  Twins  Born 

Two  conceptions  started  about  the  same  time  in 
the  early  seventies,  and  began  to  push  into  ink 
through  scattered  penstrokes,  which  then  would 
cohere  and  form  articles,  whose  collection  and  ar- 
rangement finally  made  two  volumes,  twinned  in 
origin  yet  quite  different  in  character.  So  I  recall 
their  synchronous  birth  to  memory.  Their  names 
have  quite  a  disparate  sound — the  one  being  titled 
The  American  State,  and  the  other  Shakespeare. 
What  can  they  have  in  common?  They  sprang 
from  the  same  brain  on  the  same  general  birthday, 
doubtless  from  the  same  general  cause.  I  had  writ- 
ten a  good  deal  before  this,  but  at  random;  these 
present  writings,  however,  were  products  of  the  St. 
Louis  Movement  now  working  in  me  and  through 
me  for  a  new  self-expression. 

The  deepest  and  most  distinctive  thing  in  them, 
as  I  now  review  their  purport,  was  my  persistent 
effort  to  grasp  the  World-Spirit,  which  I  may 
designate  also  as  one  form  of  divine  manifestation 
to  the  human  mind,  or  even  of  God  Himself. 
Philosophically  I  had  wrestled  with  the  pure  Idea 
of  it  for  years,  all  the  way  from  Plato  down  to 
Hegel,  but  the  time  had  come  for  me  to  see  it  in 
the  living  present,  of  which  I  was  a  small  but  active 
part  every  day,  and  to  unfold  it  as  the  ultimate 
vital  factor  in  our  American  political  system.   Still 


THE  BOOK  TWINS  BORN.  189 

further,  at  the  same  psychological  moment,  as  I 
may  construe  it,  was  born  the  imperative  push  to 
trace  this  elusive  but  super-eminent  World-Spirit, 
the  presiding  Genius  of  History,  in  Great  Litera- 
ture, especially  in  Greatest  Shakespeare,  who  must 
have  the  highest  if  he  be  the  highest. 

1.  The  American  State.  .This  was  originally  a 
series  of  essays  written  about  1871-2,  when  the  na- 
tional excitement  over  the  so-called  Reconstruction 
of  the  Southern  States  which  had  been  in  rebellion, 
was  at  its  topmost.  For  me  personally  it  was  a 
time  of  intense  mental  upheaval,  inasmuch  as  I  had 
to  reverse  my  life-long  attachment  to  a  political 
party  whose  guidance  I  had  followed  in  peace  and 
in  war.  Could  I  make  the  bitter  change  to  which 
more  and  more  my  conviction  was  driving  me?  I 
had  hitherto  accepted  without  much  serious  chal- 
lenge the  policies  of  the  Republican  organization, 
whose  principles  and  professions  I  had  inherited 
from  my  father,  re-inforced  by  my  College  associa- 
tions, and  by  the  Civil  War.  It  is  true  that  after 
the  death  of  Lincoln  I  was  deeply  dissatisfied  with 
the  party's  leadership,  still  I  waited  in  hope.  But 
as  the  second  nomination  of  President  Grant  drew 
near,  I  fell  into  open  revolt,  in  spite  of  old  affec- 
tions and  comraderies.  Thus  I  was  brought  to 
break  with  my  political  tradition  along  with  my 
other  traditions.  I  think  this  gave  me  the  hardest 
wrench  of  them  all.  For  I  had  been  a  Union  sol- 
dier, and  an  enthusiastic  supporter  of  Lincoln,  and 
I  had  already  taken  a  very  sympathetic  even  if  boy- 


190  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

ish  part  in  the  Fremont  campaign  of  1856,  and  also 
in  the  Oberlin  battle  of  1858. 

Now  what  was  it  that  caused  such  a  furious  com- 
motion within  me?  I  think  I  can  best  sum  it  up 
after  the  language  of  today  in  the  word  militarism. 
The  military  spirit  at  the  head  of  our  civil  affairs 
was  disregarding,  if  not  jeopardizing  the  freedom 
of  our  government.  I  am  not  of  those  who  believe 
that  General  Grant  purposed  the  overthrow  of  our 
institutions,  but  he  had  and  he  had  to  have  for  suc- 
cess in  war  the  soldier's  absolute  will  to  command 
and  to  obey,  according  to  which  he  could  not  help 
acting  unconsciously  in  political  matters.  Lincoln 
saw  with  anxiety  this  tendency  in  the  soldier,  saw 
it  in  Grant  and  once  at  least  sent  him  a  sharp  warn- 
ing on  this  very  point.  The  feeling  of  some  such 
peril  was  what  caused  the  split  of  1872  in  the  Re- 
publican ranks,  and  gave  to  Senator  Schurz  the 
theme  of  his  life. 

Thus  the  conflict  over  the  political  reconstruction 
of  the  South  drove  me  to  a  political  reconstruction 
of  myself  and  of  all  my  former  transmitted  pre- 
conceptions of  party.  Of  the  philosophical  set  two 
members,  Brockmeyer  and  Woerner,  were  practi- 
cally engaged  in  the  politics  of  the  time;  both, 
though  original  supporters  of  Lincoln,  were  now  in 
strong  reaction  against  the  existent  Republican 
party.  "We  often  discussed  the  impending  prob- 
lems, which  necessarily  involved  the  fundamental 
nature  of  the  State.  We  studied  famous  writers  on 


THE  BOOK  TWINS  BORN.  191 

the  subject  reaching  back  to  old  Plato's  Republic 
and  Aristotle's  Politics;  but  especially  we  poured 
over  Hegel 's  Philosophy  of  the  State  and  freely  dis- 
cussed its  worth  and  its  weakness.  Above  all  doc- 
uments of  the  past  we  delved  into  the  Constitution 
of  the  United  States,  upon  which  Brockmeyer  once 
planned  a  great  philosophic  book,  but  it  remained 
like  his  other  works  and  like  himself,  and  some- 
what like  his  city,  unrealized  and  perhaps  unreal- 
izable. Still  we  were  struck  by  his  lightning,  and 
charged  with  his  personal  electricity,  which  made 
our  brains  sparkle  and  whiz  with  new  activity. 

Thus  the  St.  Louis  Movement  had  its  political 
strain  which  grew  out  of  the  time's  circumstances. 
Well  do  I  remember  the  informal  meetings  which 
usually  took  place  Sunday  afternoons  at  my  house 
in  Targee  street,  or  rather  alley,  where  stood  what 
some  people  called  the  Philosophers'  Row,  one  of 
whose  dwellings  Harris  also  occupied  for  several 
years.  The  drift  of  the  discussion  was  in  general 
concerning  the  relation  of  the  Federal  Government 
to  the  Single-States  which  composed  it,  and  the 
means  to  prevent  each  side  from  devouring  the 
other,  to  which  act  both  sides  had  shown  a  violent 
appetite  within  less  than  a  single  decade.  We  all 
had  witnessed  and  most  of  us  had  fought  the  at- 
tempt of  the  Single-State  to  destroy  the  Union,  and 
we  had  rejoiced  in  the  latter 's  victory.  But  now  a 
few  years'  turn  had  brought  to  us  just  the  oppo- 
site danger:  the  victorious  Union,  grown  insolent 
in  its  triumph,  was  threatening  to  undo  the  Single- 


192  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

State,  by  which  deed,  if  successful,  it  would  simply 
undo  itself. 

It  was  truly  an  anxious  time  for  our  patriotism, 
and  we  invoked  to  our  help  especially  our  philos- 
ophy, which  meant  to  us  not  merely  a  soothing 
consolation  in  life's  pain,  but  the  very  instrument 
of  our  salvation.  Prominent  men  used  to  come  and 
take  a  part,  not  many  indeed,  but  all  of  them 
marked  characters.  Brockmeyer  and  Harris,  the 
two  Judges  Woerner  and  Jones,  Principal  Morgan 
and  myself,  made  the  core  of  the  group.  Only  one 
member,  as  far  as  I  know,  had  been  in  the  Con- 
federate army,  Dr.  J.  H.  "Watters,  then  a  Profes- 
sor in  McDowell's  Medical  College. 

But  the  curious  coincidence  emerges  at  the  pres- 
ent moment,  almost  fifty  years  later,  that  then  our 
little  coterie  of  a  half  dozen  or  so,  wrought  over 
and  wrestled  with  practically  the  same  problem 
which  now  is  challenging  the  whole  civilized  earth 
with  even  greater  intensity  than  ever  before.  Our 
thought  was  concerning  the  true  federation  of  our 
relatively  small  States ;  today  the  world 's  thought 
is  concerning  the  true  federation  of  the  Nations  of 
the  globe.  The  political  theme  of  the  St.  Louis 
Movement  has  thus  become  universalized  by  time. 
Our  little  microcosmic  discussion  in  a  little  par- 
lor ran  surprisingly  similar  to  the  great  macro- 
cosmic  discussion  lately  held  at  Paris  and  round 
the  globe  pertaining  to  the  universal  League ;  the 
one  wee  atom  has  grown  to  be  the  one  world-Or- 
ganism.   I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  our  St.  Louis 


the  book  twins  born.  193 

Movement  brought  all  this  about  of  itself;  it  sim- 
ply saw  and  grappled  with  what  was  already  the 
deepest  trend  of  the  age,  in  which  we  also  shared. 
Really  the  Government  of  the  United  States  has 
risen  to  be  the  earth 's  political  model ;  History  it- 
self seems  now  to  be  moving  toward  or  along  the 
lines  of  American  History,  of  which,  however,  there 
is  needed  a  complete  re-writing  and  spiritual  re- 
creation, for  all  our  chief  American  historians  are 
still  colonial  in  locality  and  in  consciousness. 

The  result  of  these  discussions  upon  myself  I  may 
briefly  chronicle  for  the  sake  of  my  autobiographic 
Ego.  The  whole  subject  I  seized  upon  and  threshed 
over  to  the  limit  of  my  powers.  Then  I  began  to 
write  it  out  into  the  essays  aforesaid,  which  were 
somewhat  later  printed  in  The  Western  and  after- 
ward gathered  into  a  booklet.  No  other  person  has 
left  any  record  of  those  colloquies;  here  first  I 
elected  myself  by  some  unconscious  ballotage  to  be 
the  scribe  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  which  office 
I  am  still  filling.  I  may  add  that  after  a  few  years' 
fierce  wrestle,  the  problem  of  Reconstruction  be- 
gan to  be  practically  settled  (in  1876),  and  my 
booklet  fell  into  a  kind  of  oblivion — it  had  almost 
lapsed  from  my  own  life  and  memory — till  after 
several  slumberous  decades  it  suddenly  wakes  up 
today  with  a  new  prophetic  meaning. 

The  treatise  first  unfolds  the  theory  of  the  State 
as  such,  in  which  Hegel  is  mainly  followed.  But 
Hegel's  ideal  was  the  Prussian  State,  at  which 
point  I  began  to  break  away  from  him,  and  to 


194  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

philosophize  our  American  political  system  in  a 
way  quite  different  from  that  of  the  master.  Espe- 
cially the  meaning  of  our  Federal  Constitution  and 
its  place  in  Universal  History  was  set  forth  with 
some  emphasis  and  with  an  import  quite  unknown 
to  the  great  German  thinker.  There  are  scattered 
glimpses  of  the  new  political  Order  which  "must 
will  the  existence  of  the  individual  State  as  uni- 
versal principle,  must  realize  this  principle  in  a 
new  form  of  government,  and  must  define  that  form 
of  government  in  a  new  Constitution." 

I  need  hardly  say  that  Europe  is  trying  to  do 
something  of  that  kind  just  now  with  much  ques- 
tioning and  somewhat  of  terror.  But  all  her  His- 
tory, when  rightly  seen  and  overseen,  shows  itself 
evolving  toward  some  such  federated  State.  And 
here  in  this  Essay  rises  another  conception  which 
has  followed  me  through  life :  that  of  the  presiding 
Genius  of  History,  or  of  the  World-Spirit,  a  very 
old  thought — I  can  trace  it  already  in  ancient  Her- 
odotus— but  whose  name  here  is  taken  from  German 
Philosophy.  Yet  its  significance  is  to-day  far  more 
commanding  than  ever,  though  little  realized  in 
present  historical  literature. 

2.  Shakespeare.  I  began  about  this  same  time  a 
scrap  heap  of  jottings  which  in  the  course  of  years 
organized  themselves  at  first  into  magazine  articles, 
and  thence  into  a  book,  which  is  the  best  known 
of  all  my  writings,  and  on  the  whole  the  bulkiest. 
Circumstances  threw  into  my  hands  the  High 
School's  instruction  in  Shakespeare,  and  therewith 


THE  BOOK  TWINS  BORN.  195 

started  a  new  and  almost  continuous  strand  of  my 
life's  work  down  to  the  present,  with  intervals  of 
suspended  interest. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  I  was  getting  somewhat 
tired  of  my  excessive  philosophical  immersion  in 
Hegel,  which  had  already  lasted  several  years. 
Philosophy  had  delivered  to  me  its  message,  or  as 
much  of  it  as  I  could  take,  for  the  present  at  least. 
That  another  world-discipline  had  begun  to  germi- 
nate underneath  all  my  Hegel,  I  may  have  dimly 
forefelt,  but  I  certainly  did  not  then  recognize. 
Still  I  longed  for  a  new  expression  of  myself  and 
of  the  universe,  less  abstract,  more  living  and 
concrete,  that  of  life  itself,  if  possible.  Hence  I 
seized  with  all  my  might  the  opportunity  to  change 
my  masters  and  their  universities,  to  pass  from 
Hegel  the  philosopher  to  Shakespeare  the  poet, 
acknowledged  to  be  the  greatest  of  his  kind  and  to 
have  built  a  world  wholly  of  his  own,  which  my 
task  was  now  to  rebuild  in  myself.  And  some 
transition  of  the  sort  was  also  working  deeply  but 
secretly  in  the  St.  Louis  Movement. 

Still  it  must  not  be  thought  that  I  flung  away 
philosophy  entirely  and  forever;  I  could  not.  On 
the  contrary,  I  took  it  over  with  me  into  Shakes- 
peare, who  also  has  his  philosophic  subtrate,  as 
his  deepest  students  have  always  noted.  I  hold 
that  he  would  not  be  the  supreme  poet  that  he  is 
unless  he  were  in  his  way  at  the  same  time  the 
supreme  philosopher.     Thus  in  my  case  my  Hegel 


196  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

was  the  forecast  and  the  preparation  for  my 
Shakespeare. 

It  so  happened  that  my  pupils  took  as  their  first 
study  Julius  Ccesar,  a  political  play,  in  which  we 
see  the  poet  grappling  with  the  loftiest  world- 
historical  character  of  all  time  at  one  of  History's 
supreme  nodes.  Such  was  for  me  the  right  cue  for 
interpreting  the  whole  drama,  which,  rippling 
along  so  buoyantly  and  on  its  surface  so  easily 
understood,  has  been  so  grievously  misunderstood 
in  its  depths,  for  it  is  the  deepest  work  of  Shakes- 
peare, with  one  possible  exception.  The  poet 
probably  conceived  and  wrote  this  play  at  the  very 
culmination  of  his  genius,  somewhere  about  his 
thirty-seventh  year,  and  hence  it  contains  his 
sublimest,  his  one  most  ideal  conception  and  char- 
acterization, that  of  the  "World-Spirit  itself,  the 
immortal  soul  of  History,  incarnate  in  a  poor 
mortal,  who  sinks  to  death  in  its  conflict,  and  there- 
fore represents  the  supreme  tragedy  of  the  indi- 
vidual man  in  his  earthly  career. 

Another  personal  touch  which  brought  me  at 
once  into  the  closest  intimacy  with  Julius  Ccesar 
and  its  author  is  that  there  are  no  less  than  four 
acknowledged  philosophers  in  this  play,  of  whom 
one  is  a  woman,  Portia,  wife  of  Brutus.  For  her  I 
have  to  think  that  Shakespeare  had  a  tender  affec- 
tion, as  it  is  the  special  privilege  of  the  poet  to  fall 
desperately  in  love  with  his  own  characters.  Thus 
Philosophy  is  not  merely  introduced  into  this 
drama,  but  is  domesticated  and  joins  the  Family. 


THE  BOOK  TWINS  BORN.  197 

Still  it  must  be  added  that  all  these  philosophers 
perish,  and  they  alone  perish  of  the  prominent  per- 
sonages, so  that  seemingly  Philosophy  itself,  of 
Greek  birth,  turns  tragic  in  old  Rome  according  to 
Shakespeare.  And,  indeed,  to  look  about  us  just 
now,  has  not  German  Philosophy  been  marching 
toward  tragedy  along  with  its  peculiarly  philosophic 
nation?  Will  it  ever  revive  to  its  former  life  and 
influence  ?  Or  has  it  passed  on  as  has  the  old  Greek 
philosophy,  though  still  indispensable  to  be  known 
as  a  part  or  phase  of  the  race's  grand  historic  dis- 
cipline ?  The  answer  of  centuries  must  be  awaited. 
The  ordinary  view  of  Julius  Ccesar  is  that  the 
play  has  not  been  rightly  named,  that  the  hero  is 
Brutus.  Such  a  conception  destroys  for  me  the 
supreme  purport  of  the  work,  lopping  off  the  gran- 
deur of  its  thought,  as  well  as  grievously  misunder- 
stands the  poets  psychology.  Indeed,  Brutus  is  rel- 
atively a  common-place  moralizer  whelmed  into  the 
vortex  of  Universal  History  to  his  utter  confusion. 
Hence  he  is  the  prototype  of  the  purely  moralistic 
mind,  be  it  orthodox  in  religion  or  agnostic.  So  I 
challenged  in  my  first  essay  the  whole  trend  of  the 
traditional  Shakespearian  criticism  as  regards  this 
most  popular  work  of  the  poet.  Moreover,  Shakes- 
peare, in  passing  from  his  English-historical  to 
Roman-historical  dramas  had  a  great  personal 
experience :  he  became  himself  universal,  rising  out 
of  his  limited  national  consciousness  and  commun- 
ing with  the  World's  History  in  one  of  its  highest 
manifestations.     In  my  humble,  very  different  life- 


198  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

line  I  had  gone  through  a  similar  experience,  and 
had  come  to  know,  philosophically  at  least,  some- 
what of  the  World-Spirit;  hence  I  recognized  it 
with  no  small  wonder  and  interest  in  its  poetic 
appearance. 

Next,  another  philosophic  play  dropped  down  on 
my  pedagogic  path,  Hamlet.  'Here,  then,  I  found 
not  the  ancient  but  the  modern  philosopher  set 
forth  with  his  unique  tragedy.  The  resemblance 
between  Julius  Ccesar  and  Hamlet  has  been  often 
noticed,  and  it  runs  very  deep,  starting  from  the 
outer  style  and  structure  and  reaching  down  to  the 
very  soul  of  all  these  dramatic  souls  on  the  stage. 
Hamlet,  too,  has  felt  the  philosophic  limit :  ' '  There 
are  more  things  in  Heaven  and  Earth  than  are 
dreamt  of  in  our  (not  your)  philosophy."  So  this 
foreboder  glooms  his  dark  questionings  to  his  next 
friend  and  fellow-student.  Here  I  seemed  to  feel 
Shakespeare  as  a  profound  and  intense  student  of 
philosophy,  now  dramatizing  the  results  of  his  con- 
siderable discipline.  He,  too,  must  have  had  his 
philosophic  epoch,  and  transcended  it,  having  won 
its  culture  and  put  it  into  his  poetry. 

I  had  often  read  these  two  dramas  before  my  pres- 
ent school-time,  and  had  felt  their  power,  especially 
in  their  single  scattered  grandeur,  for  I  had  early 
plucked  their  gorgeous  lollipops  for  school-boys. 
But  now  I  began  to  recreate  them  through  and 
through,  not  only  in  feeling  but  also  in  thought,  of 
which  I  even  discovered  Shakespeare  to  be  as  great 
a  master  as  Hegel,  if  not  greater,  though  using  a 


THE  BOOK  TWINS  BORN.  199 

wholly  new  kind  of  expression.  Moreover,  the 
realm  of  institutions  upon  which  the  St.  Louis 
Movement  had  put  so  much  stress  in  theory  and 
also  in  practice,  I  found  permeating  Shakespeare 
everywhere  as  the  basic  presupposition  of  all  his 
characters  and  of  his  social  world. 

In  like  manner  I  continued  to  tackle  one  by  one 
the  rest  of  the  works  of  the  poet,  to  organize  them 
internally,  and  then  to  unite  them  externally  into 
groups  according  to  what  seemed  to  me  their  deep- 
est principle.  Moreover,  I  kept  writing  out  and 
working  over  my  results  till  I  kneaded  them  into 
the  shape  of  essays,  which  were  printed  in  St.  Louis 
periodicals,  then  blooming  but  now  wholly  de- 
funct— notably  The  Journal  of  Speculative  Phil- 
osophy, and  The  Western.  Also,  though  a  full- 
houred  teacher  in  the  High  School,  I  found  time  to 
propagate  my  ideas  to  little  coteries  at  the  Uni- 
versity Club  and  to  various  literary  societies  else- 
where in  the  community,  thus  starting  uncon- 
sciously the  Communal  University,  which  still  is 
sending  forth  in  a  very  quiet  unnewspapered  way 
its  living  sprouts  and  some  happy  but  modest 
flowerets.  After  the  growth  of  years,  about  half  a 
dozen,  I  think,  all  these  writings,  scattered  singly 
and  looking  very  lonely  in  the  old  magazines,  per- 
sisted in  celebrating  a  general  harvest-home,  which 
brought  them  all  together  into  one  associated  work 
then  called  The  System  of  the  Shakespearian 
Drama,  whose  title  even  flung  a  word  of  defiance. 

The   publication   of   this   volume,   when   I   was 


200  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

thirty-six  years  old,  marked  better  than  any  other 
incident  the  close  of  one  large  long  Period  of  my 
life— the  first.  But  other  and  greater  enterprises 
were  budding  in  the  meantime.  Shakespeare  to  my 
mind  could  not  help  calling  up  his  fellow-giants  of 
the  World's  Literature,  of  whom  I  then  had  begun 
to  see  the  huge  outlines  of  three  more — Homer, 
Dante,  Goethe.  Were  these  Goliaths  also  to  be 
encountered  by  little  me  after  my  long  desperate 
battle  with  the  one,  probably  the  greatest?  The 
thought  kept  rising,  but  I  shrank  from  the  task ;  I 
felt  myself  unprepared  for  this  new  Gigantomachia. 
I  had  read  each  of  these  supreme  poets  after  the 
usual  fashion,  and  looked  into  not  a  little  criticism 
of  them ;  but  all  that  amounted  to  a  mere  speck,  for 
now  I  was  to  re-live  them,  talk  their  native  dialect, 
rebuild  their  world,  and,  as  far  as  possible,  recreate 
in  myself  their  very  consciousness.  At  first  I 
skulked  out  of  the  fight,  but  I  could  not  escape  the 
ever-haunting  idea.  I  must  go  to  Europe  and  there 
speak  and  hear  spoken  the  mother-tongue  of  Italian 
Dante  and  even  of  old  Greek  Homer.  This,  I  may 
premise,  was  one  of  the  incentives  driving  me  to 
the  European  Journey  which  is  soon  to  start. 

These  two  works  of  mine,  then,  I  dare  baptize  my 
Book-twins,  my  first  printed  contribution  of  any 
consequence  to  the  St.  Louis  Movement.  Both  have 
been  somewhat  prolific  of  their  kind,  having  scat- 
tered a  considerable  line  of  progeny  along  my  much 
bewritten  orbit  of  books  down  into  the  present,  with 
still  other  kindred  embryos  struggling  in  my  brain 


THE  BOOK  TWINS  BORN.  201 

for  daylight,  though  yet  unborn  and  possibly  un- 
bearable. They  both  plumped  forth  into  the  black 
sunshine  of  printer's  ink  and  got  themselves  dressed 
in  the  beautiful  white  rags  so  wonderfully  trans- 
figured at  the  paper-mill,  breaking  from  their  hum- 
ble source  in  Philosophers'  Row,  where  Harris  once 
dwelt,  and  Childs,  and  Kroeger,  but  now  an  ancient 
African  rookery  domiciling  many  playful  but  some- 
times saucy  picaninnies.  Still  the  life  there  was 
quite  plain  even  then ;  rents  unpretentious,  salaries 
very  moderate,  social  standards  not  exacting,  sym- 
posiums frequent  but  wineless,  though  not  always 
beerless.  So  we  indwelt  our  little  temple  of  Phil- 
osopholis  located  in  a  St.  Louis  alley,  pursuing 
dutifully  our  daily  bread-winning  vocation,  but  also 
cherishing  whole-heartedly  our  breadless  Super- 
vocation. 

I  should  add  by  way  of  connection  that  these  two 
preceding  books  of  mine  arose  in  the  height  and 
overflow  of  the  German  Era  of  St.  Louis,  and  to 
keen  vision  still  show  its  traces.  We  all  were  under 
the  Teutonic  spell,  which  won  an  earth-circling  new 
glamour  by  the  sudden  dazzling  triumphs  of  the 
Franco-Prussian  War,  whose  event  centered  in  this 
same  time.  To  German  Philosophy  I  have  already 
ascribed  my  acquaintance  with  my  ideal  life-long 
friend,  the  World-Spirit.  And  our  ever-spurring 
ambition  to  rise  and  to  sail  over  the  world's  top 
was  only  keeping  pace  with  our  city's  Great  Illu- 
sion of  being  just  about  to  become  the  terrene  cen- 
tral metropolis  of  all  futurity — an  access  of  urban 


202  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

megalomania  which  infected  and  puffed  up  every 
petty  civic  Ego  in  every  little  alley,  especially  in 
that  of  the  Philosophers,  who  are  usually  supposed 
to  be  peculiarly  liable  to  the  disease  transcendental. 
Under  such  conditions  we  philosophized  and  in- 
terpreted Literature  and  Life,  and  then  taught  our 
spirits'  winnings  wherever  we  might  catch  a  stray 
listener.  Moreover,  we  began  to  write  ourselves 
out  into  self-expression,  which  could  not  be  deemed 
complete  till  it  stood  forth  in  the  world  as  a  defiant 
reality  fighting  its  own  way  through  the  printed 
page.  Thus  we  centered  round  about  us  a  consider- 
able activity  of  thought  and  its  applications.  But 
alongside,  or  rather  underneath,  this  more  open 
philosophic  endeavor  was  flowing  a  less  obvious  but 
even  more  persistent  and,  perchance,  deeper  stream 
of  tendency,  of  which  a  few  forecasting  items  may 
be  next  set  down  for  sake  of  the  Future. 

VI. 

The  Poetic  Element. 

Yes,  the  confession  has  to  be  made  to  this  prosaic 
time  and  people,  that  in  the  St.  Louis  Movement 
lurks  a  poetic  strain  which  has  continued  to  sing 
through  it,  often  in  an  almost  inaudible  undertone, 
but  at  times  with  a  sudden  outburst  of  melodious 
energy,  from  its  birth  in  the  days  of  the  first  Phil- 
osophical Society  down  to  the  present  moment  of 
its  white-haired  senescence.  Pure  Thought,  even  in 
those  its  young  years,  had  a  way  of  getting  weary 


THE  POETIC  ELEMENT.  203 

of  its  own  excessive  purity,  and  of  taking  flight 
from  itself  down  into  the  more  tangible,  but  more 
earthly  and  concrete  forms  of  the  Imagination.  On 
this  score  also  I  shall  briefly  call  the  roll. 

I  never  knew  Harris  to  strike  off  a  verse  from 
his  own  poetic  mint,  if  he  had  any;  only  once  he 
submitted   to  me   his   English    translation    of   an 
Italian  poem,  which  was  intended  as  I  remember, 
to  be  sung  at  the  old  Philharmonic,  and  which  he 
for  some  reason  wished  to  be  fairly  accurate  in 
meaning  and  meter.     This  he  did  on  account  of  my 
supposed  superior  knowledge  of  Italian,  which  he 
had  heard  me  jabber  with  peanut  venders  at  street 
corners.     Still  Harris  read  and  studied  the  world's 
great  poems,  especially  Faust  and  the  Divine  Com- 
edy, of  which  the  latter  became  deeply  ingrained 
and  intergrown  with  his  own  spirit.     He  had  also 
the  curious  habit  of  memorizing  and  declaiming  to 
his  friends  Bronson  Alcott's  transcendental  poetry, 
especially  before  his  departure  from  St.  Louis  to 
Concord,    for  which   this  may  have   been   a   pre- 
paratory exercise.     Several  of  our  members  would 
poetize  upon  occasion  chiefly  for  their  own  pas- 
time.    In  this  line  the  best-known  and  most  suc- 
cessful production  was  that  of  Judge  J.  G.  Woer- 
ner,  who  wrote  a  drama,  first  in  German  and  then 
in  English,  which  was  played    on    a    number  of 
stages  throughout  the  West.     Besides  this  drama 
two  novels  are  to  be  set  down  to  his  credit.    One  of 
our  lady-teachers  wrote  at  least  one  very  accept- 
able little  lyric,  from  which  she  gathered  many 


204  THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

flowerets  of  laudation.  As  far  as  I  am  aware,  Miss 
Blow  never  dallied  with  the  Muse  creatively,  though 
she  was  certainly  well-versed  in  other  great  people's 
verses,  notably  in  those  of  the  Literary  Bibles.  I 
judge  that  she  hardly  dared  trust  herself  in  meter, 
else  she  would  have  made  her  own  translation  of 
the  quite  simple  and  rather  prosaic  rhymes  in 
Froebel  's  Mother-Play  Songs,  when  she  was  getting 
out  her  new  English  edition  of  that  work.  But  she 
turned  over  to  another  hand  even  that  not  very 
exacting  requirement  of  versification. 

Still  we  had  a  poet  in  our  midst,  a  genuine  orig- 
inal elemental  poet,  I  maintain,  but  whose  poetic 
gold  remained  as  usual  in  the  natural  nugget,  or 
was  strewn  about  at  random  underfoot  as  so  many 
shining  sands  mingled  with  so  much  dirt.  Again 
the  unrealized,  perchance  the  unrealizable  genius  of 
our  St.  Louis  Movement,  Brockmeyer!  Without 
this  poetic  power  he  could  not  have  barbed  his 
weighty  philosophy  with  flashes  of  lightning  which 
would  pierce  and  illumine  for  a  moment  at  least  the 
dullest  and  darkest  brainpan.  He  seemed  able  to 
reach  down  to  that  first  fountain-head  where  Phi- 
losophy and  Poetry,  or  the  Abstract  and  the  Con- 
crete are  one,  and,  tapping  that  prime  creative 
course,  to  draw  off  each  into  its  own  conduit  of 
utterance,  distinct,  yet  mutually  illustrative.  Not 
always  could  he  do  so  by  any  means,  but  only  at 
his  best. 

Indeed,  I  am  now  inclined  to  think  that  just  this 
poetic  element  in  Brockmeyer  was  his  deepest  and 


THE  POETIC  ELEMENT.  205 

most  original  gift — deeper  and  more  original  than 
his  philosophic  endowment.  For  his  philosophy 
was  not  his  own  but  derived,  not  his  inner  creative 
self  but  something  accepted  from  the  outside,  a  very 
good  European  affair  but  at  bottom  not  ours  or 
his,  not  finally  the  St.  Louis  Movement's  when  this 
has  come  to  full  maturity  and  realization.  How- 
ever, such  a  result  belongs  to  the  future.  At  pres- 
ent I  may  add,  that  Brockmeyer,  the  completest  in- 
carnation of  our  whole  Movement,  could  always  be 
observed  passing  from  his  abtruse  thought  and 
speech  to  his  vivid  poetic  imagery  whenever  he  was 
stirred  in  the  depths.  His  conversation  would  flash 
up  at  times  ablaze  with  metaphors,  so  that  the 
mind  would  blink  bedazzled  at  his  fire-works  of 
fantasy,  even  when  freighted  with  his  heaviest  phil- 
osophemes. 

More  than  once  I  have  intimated  that  Brock- 
meyer would  never  smelt  and  turn  into  pure  coin 
the  crude  but  rich  ores  of  his  genius;  rather  he 
would  let  them  lie  scattered  around,  quite  as  Nature 
threw  them  out  in  her  primordial  upheavals.  The 
final  human  touch  of  art  to  the  original  cosmic 
creation  of  worlds  he  seemed  unwilling  or  rather 
unable  to  give.  Still  I  must  note  the  exception,  par- 
tial though  it  be,  for  it  seems  to  hint  the  deeper 
and  truer  vein  of  his  originality.  He  did  actually 
finish  two  dramas  in  his  way,  though  they  were 
born  more  than  thirty  years  apart.  The  first  was 
named  A  Foggij  Night  at  Newport,  a  most  nebulous 
message,  as  if  sent  down  directly  from  old-Norse 


206  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

Niflheim,  the  primitive  Teutonic  fog-world  of  the 
North.  It  shows,  however,  a  goodly  study  and  not 
a  little  straight  imitation,  even  in  words,  of  those 
two  greatest  skaldic  descendants,  Shakespeare  and 
Goethe,  both  of  them  Northern  in  origin  and 
tongue.  It  was  written  about  1860,  printed,  paid 
for,  and  distributed  by  a  few  philosophic  friends 
who  were  poetic  enough  to  hail  it  as  the  new  avatar 
of  Poesy  herself  in  America,  a  young  Faust  at 
least.  That  was  some  four  or  more  years  before  my 
arrival  in  St.  Louis,  so  that  Brockmeyer  and  the 
philosophers  had  been  allowed  time  enough  to  be 
cured  of  this  first  little  illusion,  and  to  get  obsessed 
fully  of  the  second,  the  great  St.  Louis  Illusion, 
under  whose  spell  I  found  them,  and  not  long 
afterwards  myself.  Brockmeyer  then  lodged  some- 
where on  the  old  South  Market  in  a  single  bare 
attic,  boarding  himself  and  sleeping  on  the  floor, 
(so  I  have  heard  him  with  humor  dilate).  He  had 
been  frugally  pensioned  with  bread  and  roomrent 
by  the  fore-mentioned  group  of  friends,  whose 
leader  was  Harris,  and  who  were  themselves  at 
that  time  a  set  of  poor  vagabonds  in  the  city,  to 
make  the  translation  of  Hegel's  Larger  Logic  (the 
Book  of  Fate,)  which  was  also  intended  to  be  a 
world-stormer.  I  should  here  add  that  Harris  was 
then  a  wandering  teacher  of  Ben  Pitman's  short- 
hand. But  Brockmeyer  after  a  time  grew  sick  of 
tracking  and  mapping  that  vast  Sahara  of  Hege- 
lian abstractions,  grew  so  desperately  image-thirsty 
that  he  took  sudden  flight  one  day  from  anhydrous 


THE  POETIC  ELEMENT.  207 

Philosophy  to  upwelling  Poetry  as  the  green  oasis 
of  salvation,  from  whose  fountains  everywhere  be- 
gan to  bubble  out  this  fantastic  drama,  the  whim- 
sicalities of  which  he  patched  together  into  a  rather 
crotchety  whole.  In  1866  when  we  were  forming 
the  first  Philosophical  Society,  I  heard  of  it  and 
tried  to  drum  up  a  copy,  but  could  not;  Brock- 
meyer  told  me  he  had  kept  none  himself,  and  I 
thought  somehow  by  his  nose-sign  that  he  never 
wanted  to  hear  anything  more  of  it.  Soon,  how- 
ever, in  rummaging  over  an  old  dirty  mess  of  sec- 
ond-hand books  in  a  book-stall,  I  came  upon  six 
new  copies  and  at  once  filliped  down  the  small  price 
in  the  Civil  War's  paper  money  then  still  current. 
I  showed  them  to  Harris  who  on  the  spot  claimed 
three  of  them  as  his  own  precious  treasure;  the 
other  two  I  gave  away,  while  the  third  I  kept  for 
a  time  but  must  have  loaned  for  good,  since  I  have 
these  many  years  moused  after  it  in  vain  among 
my  book-refuse  scattered  along  the  path  of  my 
travels  in  Chicago,  in  St.  Louis,  and  even  in 
Cincinnati. 

The  inaugural  of  Brockmeyer  as  President  of  our 
Philosophical  Society,  which  I  heard,  made  the  an- 
nouncement that  he  was  then  writing  a  drama 
"with  an  American  content",  but  he  never  fin- 
ished it  till  a  quarter  of  a  century  later,  when  he 
was  getting  to  be  an  old  man.  He  read  it  to  me 
from  the  easy  chair  of  his  back-room,  with  many 
side  flashes  of  metaphorical  humor,  often  more  tell- 
ing, I  thought,  than  his  text.    For  I  have  to  think 


208  THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT—PART  FIRST. 

that  the  cream  of  Brockmeyer  's  genius  usually  got 
quite  skimmed  off  when  he  squeezed  it  through  his 
pen-point  into  ink.  It  is  too  bad  that  he  never 
found,  or  provided  for  himself  a  human  phono- 
graph, like  the  talk-recording  Eckerman,  as  old 
Goethe  did.  Strange  to  say,  this  second  drama 
seems  to  have  spontaneously  uprisen  in  him  as  kind 
of  poetical  relief  or  counterblast,  while  he  was 
making,  about  1890-5,  his  second  translation  of 
Hegel's  Logic,  (a  kind  of  translation  of  a  transla- 
tion), reviving  thus  the  ambition  and  the  task  of 
his  thirties  in  his  grayed  sixties.  Again  I  have  to 
think  in  this  case  also  that  his  larger  and  more 
creative  nature  was  asserting  itself  as  the  poet 
against  the  philosopher,  who  was  simply  revamp- 
ing an  old  transmitted  doctrine  of  a  past  and  alien 
time,  instead  of  creating  out  of  himself  an  original 
work  of  his  own  spirit  and  age.  Still  these  two 
dramas  are  his  only  finished  first-hand  products, 
and  seem  to  suggest  that  he  might  have  achieved 
some  work  massive  and  organic  in  poetry,  if  he  had 
only  kept  up  the  training  of  his  wayward  genius. 

The  present  autobiographic  Ego  may  be  per- 
mitted here  to  append  a  few  brief  notes  upon  his 
own  small  poetic  household.  So  I  shall  mention 
that  a  stream  of  verses  would  gush  up  to  the  sur- 
face of  my  best  daytime,  and  insist  upon  some  form 
of  expression  for  a  spell,  then  it  would  quietly  sink 
away  into  my  unvoiced  underworld,  like  a  Greek 
catabothron,  where  it  would  seemingly  sleep  a  wee 


THE  POETIC  ELEMENT.  209 

dark  life  of  its  own,  not  by  any  means  dying,  but 
secretly  dreaming.  In  the  present  period  I  re- 
sponded to  my  two  closest  associates,  Brockmeyer 
and  Woerner,  by  writing  a  drama  also  upon  an 
American  theme.  This  was  my  first-born  produc- 
tion of  any  size  or  consequence,  to  which  I  gave  the 
quite  neutral  name  of  Clarence.  The  skillful  ob- 
server, if  he  takes  the  trouble,  can  discern  in  it 
everywhere  the  traces  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement, 
to  which  it  was  my  earliest  independent  contribu- 
tion. And  here  I  may  note  that  Brockmeyer 's 
aforesaid  drama,  A  Foggy  Night  at  Newport,  was, 
as  far  as  my  knowledge  goes,  the  first  preluding 
note  of  our  coming  St.  Louis  Movement,  the  first 
printed  document  forecasting  its  possible  birth, 
which  thus  had  something  poetical  in  its  very 
genesis.  Now  I  believe  that  it  was  this  funda- 
mental imaginative  power  which  drew  me  and 
clasped  me  to  Brockmeyer,  who  could  be  otherwise 
very  unattractive.  Harris  had  no  such  ultimate 
poetic  element  in  his  nature,  as  I  construe  him; 
though  he  used  imagery  often  with  effect,  it  ap- 
pealed rather  as  an  outside  illustrative  decoration ; 
he  was  first  and  last  the  philosopher  purely,  where- 
in lay  his  power.  Of  these  two  life-friends  of 
mine,  I  have  to  conclude,  therefore,  that  Brock- 
meyer held  me  by  a  deeper,  more  innate  spiritual 
bond  than  Harris,  though  both  I  felt  to  be  sym- 
metrical and  integrating  halves  of  one  common 
brotherhood  of  spirit,  whose  kinship  with  me  ran 
deeper  than  that  of  blood,  and  was  twined  insepa- 


210  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

rably  with  my  immortal  part,  whenever  I  dared 
think  I  had  any. 

In  my  own  poetical  history,  the  earliest  remem- 
bered composition  of  mine  expressed  a  sudden  spon- 
taneous upgush  at  school,  when  I  was  some  nine  or 
ten  years  old,  being  a  perfervid  boyish  harangue  in 
verse  inspired  on  the  moment  by  and  imitated  from 
Shakespeare's  speeches,  which  I  found  in  M'Guf- 
fey's  Fifth  Reader.  At  College  there  was  an  occa- 
sional versified  outbreak — not  many,  for  another 
more  crushing  question  (the  national)  menaced  the 
time  and  me.  But  when  I  reached  St.  Louis  at  the 
close  of  the  War,  there  arose  a  rather  steady  stream 
of  versicles  for  a  couple  of  years  or  more,  inasmuch 
as  the  young  man's  emotional  nature  insisted  upon 
its  God-given  right  of  tuneful  expression.  At  a 
somewhat  later  time  both  love  and  sorrow  burst 
furiously,  I  may  say  tragically,  upon  me  and  broke 
up  the  even  course  of  existence,  so  that  they  could 
only  be  placated  by  the  corresponding  utterance 
in  poetry,  which  thus  had  for  me  always  a  healing, 
remedial,  vicarious  function,  though  upon  others  it 
may  have  produced  an  opposite  effect.  So  through 
all  this  first  Period  of  mine  kept  trickling  at  certain 
intervals  as  far  back  as  memory  can  grope  drop- 
lets of  rhymes  from  my  perturbed  soul-world, 
whose  little  gushes  would  intermit  after  an  over- 
flow, but  would  in  time  begin  again.  Of  their 
strictly  poetic  value  I  took  less  account,  as  I  never 
sent  one  of  them  to  newspaper  or  magazine;  but 
their  relieving,  reconciling  power  became  the  deep- 


THE  POETIC  ELEMENT.  211 

est  need  of  my  spirit,  which  never  failed  to  find 
in  them  a  self-sanative,  even  a  self-fulfilling  virtue. 
Poetry  in  my  case  always  paid  its  own  bills  in 
advance. 

It  must,  however,  be  granted  that  the  poetic  ele- 
ment in  the  St.  Louis  Movement  never  brought  forth 
any  great  or  lasting  literary  work;  no  verse  or 
phrase  of  its  production  is  rememberable  to-day, 
unless  dug  up  by  a  special  antiquarian  excavation. 
Nothing  of  ours  ever  approached  in  universal  fame 
those  winged  words  of  Reavis:  The  Future  Great 
City  of  the  World,  which  seemed  to  be  flying 
around  the  globe.  But  at  the  time  this  poetic  ele- 
ment of  us  performed  its  good  part  for  a  small 
circle.  Then  poetry  was  here  in  deep  eclipse ;  the 
man  who  dared  the  Muse  was  by  the  majority 
deemed  badly  rattled,  if  not  irresponsible  outright. 
At  best  the  jingling  lilt  of  verse  was  handed  over 
to  the  school-age,  more  or  less  in  imitation  of  Long- 
fellow, true  poet  of  adolescence.  Very  different  is 
the  situation  to-day.  Poetry  is  challenging  the  at- 
tention of  the  world,  and  is  performing  all  sorts  of 
new  gyrations  and  somersaults  metrical  and  other- 
wise, having  risen  to  rival  even  the  novel  in  public 
vogue.  Verily  every  man  and  woman,  high  and 
low,  seem  now  verse-bitten;  each  self  will  be  its 
own  poet.  Thus  is  poetry  getting  truly  democ- 
ratized along  with  the  rest  of  the  world,  being  no 
longer  the  aristocratic  art  of  some  solitary  genius, 
but  the  universally  attuned  expression  of  the  folk 
itself.     So  it  may  be  said  that  the  poetic  element 


212  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

of  our  St.  Louis  Movement  even  in  its  well-leveled 
mediocrity,  has  its  significance,  its  germinal  fore- 
show of  the  coming  efflorescence,  piping  its  small- 
voiced  message  almost  inaudible  from  its  first  mo- 
ment. As  for  me,  during  a  life-time  I  have  cher- 
ished it  as  one  of  my  striving  spirit's  chief  liber- 
ators into  the  freedom  of  my  own  self-expression, 
which,  being  fully  realized,  is  the  fulfillment  of  a 
man 's  having  lived. 

So  it  may  be  prognosticated  that  underneath  all 
the  philosophy  and  the  literature,  and  even  the 
psychology  perhaps,  of  our  St.  Louis  Movement, 
lies  an  underworld  of  poetry  which  has  never  yet 
been  able  to  form  itself  and  to  push  up  to  the  light. 
Let  the  forethoughtful  reader  take  note. 

VII. 

Life's  Central  Node. 

When  I  had  broken  away  from  St.  Louis  and 
from  America  and  was  tossing  toward  Europe  up 
and  down  on  shipboard  along  with  the  shoreless 
ocean's  uncertainties,  I  dimly  felt  myself  making 
the  unique  change  of  my  life,  the  central  transi- 
tion of  it  from  a  considerable  amount  of  the  past 
to  a  possible  considerable  amount  of  the  future. 
I  was  no  longer  young,  nor  was  I  exactly  old,  but 
on  the  road  somewhere  between;  the  first  half  of 
the  human  drama  seemed  over,  the  second  half 
seemed  about  to  start  playing.  I  had  just  quit 
my  own  past,  and  was  going  toward  my  race's 


LIFE'S  CENTRAL  NODE.  213 

past^-a  deep  separation  both  in  space  and  in  spirit, 
as  it  turned  out.  Thus  I  sat  on  deck  mooning  over 
myself  both  in  backlook  and  in  forelook,  having 
scored  six  and  thirty  in  the  tale  of  years ;  whereof 
I  find  the  record  jotted  down  in  a  little  diary  which 
still  bears  the  spray  marks  of  the  plunging  steam- 
ship. Evidently  I  felt  the  presage  then  and  there 
that  I  was  undergoing  the  pivotal  transfer  of  my 
career,  rounding  into  a  new  stage  or  sweep  my 
life's  chief  node.  I  did  not  then  glimpse  what  time 
has  since  taught  me,  that  this  was  quite  an  uni- 
versal human  experience,  though  it  stood  out  the 
grander  always  in  the  grander  spirits  of  the  cen- 
turies. 

A  theory  or  rather  an  ingrown  conviction  of 
mine  has  slowly  matured  that  somewhere  about  the 
middle  years  of  his  third  decade,  the  man  makes 
the  supreme  orbital  turn  of  his  whole  life's  cycle. 
He  then  evolves  into  and  across  his  most  signal  and 
decisive  line  of  demarcation  between  what  he  has 
been  and  what  he  is  to  be,  even  if  he  is  always 
drawing  similar  lines  with  the  years.  Still  there 
is,  I  believe,  one  such  all-comprehensive  land-mark 
or  turning-point  in  life.  The  fact  is  of  such  gen- 
eral interest  and,  I  think,  of  such  far-reaching  sig- 
nificance especially  in  biography,  that  I  may  be 
allowed  to  fortify  the  doctrine  with  some  details. 

To  begin  with  the  highest  examples,  Dante 
clearly  indicates  such  a  change  of  himself  in  the 
first  line  of  his  great  poem,  where  he  tells  openly 
of  the  strange  new  condition  in  which  he  found 


214  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

himself  "at  the  middle  of  the  journey  of  our  life," 
when  he  was  about  thirty-five  years  old.  Even 
more  emphatically  and  directly  Goethe  points  out 
the  grand  climacteric  of  his  total  career,  bringing 
forth  in  him  a  new  birth  of  the  spirit,  which  took 
place  through  his  journey  of  Italy,  starting  when 
he  was  thirty-six.  Thus  these  two  supreme  poets 
have  told  on  themselves  in  so  many  words;  but  I 
hold  that  even  the  self-secreting  Shakespeare  has 
revealed  the  same  leading  life-line  in  his  works,  as 
these  move  out  his  first  stage  into  his  second  and 
greatest  stage,  that  of  his  mighty  tragedies — which 
transition  must  have  taken  place  between  his 
thirty -fifth  and  fortieth  years,  though  it  cannot  be 
precisely  dated.  Even  oldest  Homer,  whose  single 
personality  has  been  doubled  and  even  manifolded, 
and  whose  century  cannot  be  given  with  certainty, 
has  left  us  two  books,  which  with  all  their  objectiv- 
ity are  likewise  autobiographical  to  the  open-souled 
reader,  who  will  feel  and  also  see  that  Homer  him- 
self in  his  spirit  turned  away  from  Greece  and 
went  to  Troy  with  Achilles  when  a  younger  man, 
and  then  returned  after  twenty  years'  separation, 
with  old-wise  Ulysses  to  "sunny  Ithaca  and  pru- 
dent Penelope."  Thus  the  greatest  human  world- 
makers,  authors  of  our  Literary  Bibles,  show  this 
distinctive  crisis  or  turning-point  both  in  life  and 
in  writ. 

Some  celebrated  people  have  not  made  the 
grand  passage,  into  this  new  stage,  but  have  been 
halted  by  death  at  its  entrance:  such  we  may  re- 


LIFE'S  CENTRAL  NODE.  215 

gard  Byron,  Raphael,  Shelly  and  I  would  add  Mar- 
garet Fuller.  Our  Emerson  achieved,  as  we  con- 
strue him,  somewhat  earlier  than  usual,  at  the  age 
of  thirty-two  or  thirty-three,  his  transit  into  his 
characteristic  period,  becoming  the  recusant  of  his 
age,  revolutionary,  transcendental.  His  friend 
Carlyle  had  a  similar  periodic  turn-over  when  he 
passed  locally  from  Scotland  to  London,  and  spirit- 
ually from  writing  magazine  articles  to  composing 
Great  History.  And  our  humble  unobtrusive 
Johnny  Appleseed  upon  his  wandering  path  mani- 
fests a  similar  essential  change  in  his  career. 

In  like  manner  the  leading  worthies  of  our  St. 
Louis  Movement,  of  whom  this  book  specially  seeks 
to  bring  four  to  the  front,  show  an  axial,  all-deter- 
mining turn  in  their  lives.  Brockmeyer  had  sev- 
eral momentous  crises,  but  the  central  one,  in  my 
judgment,  was  his  return  about  his  middle  thirties, 
out  of  his  Titanic  estrangement  in  the  Missouri 
backwoods,  to  civilization  and  to  institutional  life, 
whereupon  among  his  varied  achievements  he 
founded  our  St.  Louis  Philosophical  Society,  which 
otherwise  had  never  existed,  and  without  which  this 
book  of  mine  could  not  have  been  written,  and 
probably  some  others.  Harris  had  also  his  nodal 
separation  from  St.  Louis,  and  his  return  to  New 
England,  which  actually  took  place  in  his  forties, 
though  spiritually  it  was  manifest  years  earlier. 
In  a  similar  way  I  conceive  Davidson's  main  life- 
stroke,  which  came  about  when  he  quit  his  St. 
Louis  schooling,  more  significant  for  him  than  his 


216  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  FIRST. 

Scotch  University,  and  thereupon  turned  back 
Eastward,  as  he  circled  around  his  thirty-fifth  year. 
And  Miss  Blow  had  her  profound  separation — 
doubtless  more  deeply  rending  and  painful  than 
either  of  the  others,  for  it  nearly  killed  her,  being 
a  rupture  from  home,  friends,  social  rank,  and  espe- 
cially from  the  scene  of  her  great  personal  achieve- 
ment— which  event  occurred  somewhere  near  her 
middle  thirties;  so  we  dare  vaguely  guess  in  the 
sensitive  matter  of  a  lady's  age. 

In  fact  the  St.  Louis  Movement  itself  manifested 
in  its  history  this  same  breach  or  rupture,  as  we 
have  already  portrayed  it,  in  the  flight  of  its  lead- 
ing early  members,  and  their  scattering,  like  a 
flock  of  blackbirds  shot  into  and  flying  asunder 
toward  all  points  of  the  compass.  And  it  may  be 
here  foresaid,  that  long  afterwards  there  took  place 
a  kind  of  return  to  the  city,  not  complete  certainly 
but  perceptible.  Whereof  somewhat  may  be  told 
in  a  later  chapter. 

Nor  should  we  forget  to  remark  a  far-reaching 
inference  from  the  foregoing  instances:  all  these 
particular  biographies  suggest  or  perhaps  enforce 
the  idea  of  an  Universal  Biography ;  there  are  many 
lives  of  many  men  of  the  widest  diversity,  but  in 
them  all  lurks  the  one  life  of  the  one  Man,  life  of 
Genus  Homo,  of  the  true  Super-Man  (not  that  of 
Nietzsche).  Emerson  has  now  and  then,  but  not 
always  glimpsed  this  Universal  Man  incarnating 
himself  in  the  myriads  of  individual  men,  and 
named  him  the  Standard  Man,  who  is  the  real  cen- 


LIFE'S  CENTRAL  NODE.  217 

tral  creative  source  of  interest  in  human  biography. 
And  here  may  be  permitted  another  brief  infer- 
ence :  this  universal  principle  or  all-pervasive  proc- 
ess of  every  man's  life  may  yet  be  unfolded  as  the 
law  of  Biography  itself,  thus  transforming  the 
present  biographic  chaos  into  the  order  and  trans- 
parency of  a  science. 


Renascence 

I  would  gladly  now  take  my  reader,  if  he  be 
willing,  into  my  confidence  and  whisper  to  him 
with  some  trepidation,  my  present  object:  I  am 
trying  to  periodize  myself.  What  is  that,  he  may 
well  ask.  In  general,  it  is  to  survey  and,  if  pos- 
sible, to  define  a  Period  of  my  entire  life — not  the 
whole  cycle  of  it  but  one  of  its  great  arcs.  Such  a 
task  is,  in  my  view,  fundamental  for  every  work  of 
biography. 

The  widest,  deepest  break  in  my  existence,  or  the 
grand  node  of  my  life-work,  was  when  I  turned 
away  from  St.  Louis  and  started  for  Europe  a 
few  days  before  I  was  thirty-seven  years  old.  As 
I  look  back  at  my  deed  now,  through  the  interven- 
ing trials  of  nearly  half  a  century,  I  almost  tremble 
218 


RENASCENCE.  219 

at  what  I  then  dared,  merely  throwing  some  inquis- 
itive glances  into  the  dark  chasm  ahead.  Of  course 
I  did  not,  could  not  foresee  what  a  long  discipline 
lay  in  that  seemingly  insignificant  act,  whose  direct 
effects  were  to  run  through  a  full  generation  of 
my  years.  At  least  so  I  now  mark  out  and  con- 
strue, from  my  old-age's  height  of  retrospect,  the 
Middle  Period  of  my  life,  which  started  with  my 
first  departure  from  St.  Louis  in  1877  and  lasted 
till  my  completed  return  to  the  same  place  some 
three  decades  later.  Let  these  dates  be  set  down 
as  the  two  temporal  limits,  fore  and  aft,  which  can 
be  made  elastic  according  to  need. 

The  next  problem  is  to  find  some  brief  phrase 
or  even  single  vocable  which  may  suggest,  even  if 
remotely,  the  meaning  or  general  purport  of  this 
protracted  and  somewhat  diversified  Period.  Can 
I  compass  it  in  a  passably  intelligible  term  or  fore- 
word which  may  always  be  recalled  when  wanted, 
as  a  kind  of  clew  mid  the  tangled  labyrinth  of  life 
now  to  be  explored,  and  ordered  if  possible  ?  Such 
a  word,  after  some  search  and  repeated  changes,  I 
have  found  in  the  term  Renascence,  or  New  Birth 
which  at  least  hints  the  spiritual  process  not  only 
in  myself,  but  also  in  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  and, 
as  I  believe,  in  the  time.  Thus  I  began  to  be 
born  again  through  my  European  Journey,  and 
I  kept  up  this  my  Renascence  till  old-age  started 
to  steal  slyly  over  me,  upon  whose  advance  I  have 
placed  the  foregoing  limit  of  a  date  which  may 
be  only  artificial  and  perchance  temporary.     Ob- 


220    THE  ST- LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

serve  that  I  avoid  the  corresponding  French  term 
Renaissance,  which  bears  a  different  though  related 
significance. 

Two  other  expressions  in  the  preceding  account 
may  need  a  brief  comment.  I  have  alluded  to  my 
Departure  from  and  my  Return  to  St.  Louis,  which 
I  would  again  emphasize.  Thus  is  hinted  the 
spatial  round,  or  it  may  be  the  encircling  orbit  of 
the  Period  sweeping  through  its  time.  Now  this 
Departure  and  Return,  outward  in  Nature,  has 
also  its  inner  counterpart  in  Spirit — both  in  me 
and  in  the  St.  Louis  Movement.  Both  of  us  went 
away  and  came  back.  Birth  is  the  first  great  sepa- 
ration which  ushers  the  individual  into  the  light; 
my  Renascence  was  my  second  birth  into  the 
world's  illumination,  for  which  I  had  to  quit  my 
immediate  environment  till  I  had  wrought  out  my 
restoration.  The  infant  coming  from  its  immediate 
sinless  and  sunless  home  into  sunshine,  has  made 
its  first  new  Departure,  typical  of  others  in  after 
days,  so  the  original  human  nascence  becomes  the 
foreshow  and  the  primal  expression  of  all  later 
human  Renascences. 

Accordingly,  this  my  Second  Period,  opens  with 
a  great  separation  from  my  previous  immediate 
American  life,  which  I  had  hitherto  lived,  umbili- 
cally  as  it  were,  remaining  unborn  in  a  sense,  till  I 
pushed  out  across  the  interjacent  ocean  to  my  re- 
generating home.  Even  from  my  last-acquired  St. 
Louis  descipline,  Philosophy,  I  must  part;  I  had 
gotten  all  it  would  give,  at  least  so  I  thought, 
and  even  more  deeply  felt.     The  philosophical 


RENASCENCE.  221 

world  view  I  had  absorbed,  wrought  over  into  my 
mentality,  and  applied  to  a  number  of  intellectual 
realms  in  my  own  private  workshop,  and  especially 
in  my  instruction  at  the  High  School.  Nature, 
Art,  History,  Institutions,  yea  Philosophy  itself 
from  old  Greece  down  to  the  present,  I  had  Hegel- 
ized.  I  felt  the  surfeit  of  abstraction  and  of  tradi- 
tion as  well  as  the  prison  of  my  locality — of  St. 
Louis,  yea  of  America.  Finally  the  circumstances 
of  life  had  so  squared  themselves  to  my  Departure 
that  I  seemed  to  hear  the  urgent  invitation  of 
Providence  Himself:  "Now  is  the  time  to  go — 
pack  up  and  be  off.  Forward  to  the  other  side 
of  the  World,  or  of  the  Universe,  and  see  what  is 
there." 

I  felt  it  also  to  be  a  going  back  to  my  old  antece- 
dent pre- American  self  in  distant  lands  and  long- 
agone  cultures.  Still,  in  a  sense,  I  could  not  run 
away  from  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  I  had  to  take 
it  with  me,  and  through  it  look  at  my  fresh  expe- 
riences. It  had  become  integrated  with  my  life, 
with  my  very  consciousness. 

Departure,  then,  is  the  word  and  the  thing  which 
I  have  to  stress  at  this  point.  Doubtless  the  term 
sounds  strange  on  its  first  hearing — Departure — 
by  which  I  seek  to  designate  the  break  into  an  en- 
tire new  Period  of  my  own  evolution,  and  also  of 
the  St.  Louis  Movement,  in  so  far  as  the  latter  pro- 
ceeds along  my  lines  of  activity.  Moreover  this 
Departure  from  St.  Louis,  or  separation  from  its 
local  and  cultural  life,  continued  toward  thirty 


222    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

years,  till  the  Return  came  and  with  it  a  kind  of 
rejuvenescence  of  the  old  Movement.  The  preceding 
Epoch,  which  shut  down  somewhat  abruptly  as  I 
leaped  on  a  railroad  train  and  crossed  the  Mis- 
sissippi River,  speeding  in  an  unbroken  time-line 
for  Europe,  embraced  my  stay  at  St.  Louis  lasting 
some  thirteen  years.  But  now  I  am  off,  on  this 
December  day  of  1877,  having  passed  just  beyond 
the  middle  year  of  the  journey  of  human  life,  as 
Dante  records  of  himself  when  he  steps  out  of  his 
previous  world  over  into  his  Inferno.  So  the  old 
Florentine  poet  preludes  his  famous  Departure,  as 
we  may  call  it  here  for  the  sake  of  a  moment's 
comparison,  and  proceeds  to  sing,  through  his  three 
Canticles,  the  marvelous  experiences  which  befell 
him  after  his  Grand  Crossing.  And  every  man 
has  his  Grand  or  Petty  Crossing  in  life's  journey; 
this  European  trip  I  hold  to  be  mine. 

In  the  present  Departure,  then,  I  quit  St.  Louis, 
but  I  take  the  St.  Louis  Movement  along  with  me 
over  lands  and  seas,  and  then  bring  it  back  home 
again.  Hitherto  I  clung  to  the  immediate  locality 
of  the  Movement,  to  its  city  and  people  and  to  its 
studies ;  but  now  the  breach  has  come,  that  separa- 
tion, spatial  and  spiritual,  which  seldom  is  wanting 
to  any  complete  human  discipline. 

In  the  larger  sense  the  Departure  was  along  its 
entire  course  a  Departure  from  Tradition,  and  in- 
deed a  new  and  deeper  Departure  therefrom.  Al- 
ready we  have  indicated  that  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment had  its  first  push  in  a  strong  spiritual  revul- 


RENASCENCE.  223 

sion  against  the  four  prescribed  cultural  elements 
which  it  found  already  seeded  and  greening  in  St. 
Louis.  Hence  arose  the  fifth  cultural  element, 
home-grown,  distinctive,  sprung  of  the  time  and 
the  city's  native  character;  this  we  called  our  own 
St.  Louis  Movement,  which  never  failed  to  assert 
its  prime  originality.  And  yet  it  too  was  based 
upon  Tradition;  it  prescribed  a  European  philos- 
opher and  his  philosophy  just  to  attack  and  sup- 
plant European  prescription.  We  followed  tradi- 
tional Hegel  in  order  to  become  anti-traditional. 
And  this  negative  service,  very  necessary  at  the 
start  for  clearing  the  way,  the  German  thinker 
performed  for  us,  and  along  with  it  conferred  other 
great,  though  perhaps  lesser  benefits. 

But  in  time  the  lurking  contradiction  strove  to 
work  itself  out,  and  it  made  itself  felt  at  first  un- 
consciously by  me,  and,  as  I  believe,  by  the  Philo- 
sophical Society,  which  began  to  waste  away 
through  its  own  inner  self-attrition  and  to  pass 
over  into  something  else.  Now  it  was  primarily 
this  feeling  of  discord  with  myself  and  with  my 
accepted  philosophic  doctrine  that  drove  me  out  of 
my  first  exclusive  cultivation  of  it,  so  that  I  be- 
took myself  to  other  forms  of  human  expression, 
such  as  art  and  poetry.  I  may  add,  in  view  of 
what  occurred  long  afterwards,  and  will  be  re- 
counted in  its  place  that  I  must  have  begun  to 
catch  the  undertone  of  contradiction  not  only  in 
Hegel  but  in  all  Philosophy,  from  old  Greek  Thales 
down  to  the  present.    Hegel  had  indeed  answered 


224    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

the  so-called  antinomies  of  Kant,  so  I  believed; 
but  he  had  left  in  his  own  work  a  yet  deeper  anti- 
nomy, in  fact  the  deepest  of  all,  the  one  inherent  in 
Philosophy  itself  as  the  supreme  European  world- 
discipline.  This  ultimate  philosophic  antinomy 
was  seething  itself  out  in  my  laboring  mind,  as 
thought's  final  self-negation,  when  I  seized  my 
opportunity  to  run  away  from  it  in  search  of  some 
more  harmonious  utterance  of  myself  and  of  my 
time.  And  to-day  the  reflection  keeps  echoing 
within  me  that  Europe  now  is  working  out  in  the 
blood  of  her  peoples  the  original  contradiction  of 
her  spirit  as  expressed  most  deeply  in  the  whole 
line  of  her  Philosophies,  from  Thales  to  Bergson. 

Thus  in  a  far-away  retrospection  I  try  to  ex- 
plain myself,  looking  through  a  commentary  of 
forty  years.  I  was  then  unconscious  of  what  was 
impelling  me,  now  I  believe  me  conscious.  So  long 
it  has  taken  me  to  know  the  cause  which  I  then 
dimly  felt,  and  which  was  driving  me  to  solve  the 
philosophic  dualism  of  Europe,  which  I  had  in- 
herited and  laboriously  overwrought,  and  to  re- 
place it  by  a  new  world-discipline  born  of  our  own 
country's  deeds  and  institutions.  In  other  words 
universal  Psychology  was  throbbing  embryonically 
underneath  my  Philosophy,  but  the  embryo  would 
require  many  a  long  year  before  it  was  ready  to 
spring  forth  into  the  light  of  day! 

So  I  in  review  have  to  think  my  journey 
abroad  was  the  creative  urge  to  a  new  and  pro- 
tracted stage  of  my  career.     Meanwhile  what  be- 


RENASCENCE.  225 

came  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement?  I  can  only  re- 
peat that  I  bore  it  along  with  me,  what  of  it  was 
mine ;  what  of  it  was  not  mine,  I  naturally  left  by 
the  wayside.  I  could  not  wholly  escape  from  all 
that  I  had  been  and  done ;  it  still  murmured  along 
within  me  as  an  underflowing  current  of  influence 
throughout  this  fresh  voyage  of  discovery.  But  I 
can  truly  say  that  Philosophy  was  subordinate  dur- 
ing these  travels;  my  mind  was  turned  outward, 
not  so  much  inward. 

Even  in  my  reaction  against  Tradition,  I  found 
I  had  been  all  the  while  absorbing  the  traditional 
culture  of  Europe  which  had  come  to  me  through 
various  channels  from  the  outside,  and  which  I 
had  duly  appropriated  as  my  first  education  at 
School  and  College.  But  just  this  outsideness  of 
my  spirit's  most  precious  aliment  made  me  feel 
unfree  and  even  unhappy,  and  I  resolved  to  find 
the  remedy  by  going  back  to  the  prime  cultural 
source,  and  there  observing  life  afresh,  and,  if  pos- 
sible, living  it  in  its  very  origin.  So  from  St. 
Louis  I  started  for  the  head-waters  of  European 
civilization  in  old  Hellas.  The  prescribed  Greek 
tongue  I  had  learned  in  the  school-room  after  the 
prescribed  way,  but  now  I  would  seize  it  unpre- 
scribed  by  drinking  of  it  at  its  first  throb  from  the 
hearts  of  the  people  who  still  spoke  it  attuned  to 
their  mother's  early  lisp.  And  I  would  make  Cas- 
talia's  fount  gush  into  spontaneous  English.  Thus 
the  mere  erudite  tradition  of  classic  lore  with  its 
dead  grammar  and  dictionary  I  would  re-bear  to 


226    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

new  life  from  my  own  spirit's  genesis,  and  en- 
deavor to  transfuse  the  same  into  my  modern  ver- 
nacular for  my  own  self-expression,  as  well  as  for 
impartation  to  others  who  might  be  willing  to  lis- 
ten. 

But  this  Greek  revival  was  only  the  first  act  of 
the  present  Period,  which  was  to  be  followed  by 
others  in  due  evolution  both  of  myself  and  of  the 
St.  Louis  Movement.  For  the  Greek  Renascence 
in  me  was  to  rise  to  the  European,  and  beyond 
Europe  it  was  to  become  universal.  All  of  which 
is  first  to  be  lived  and  achieved,  and  then  to  find 
expression. 

iThe  interest  of  this  deepest  Departure  of  all  my 
days  turns  on  the  fact  that  while  I  was  all  unaware 
of  its  meaning  at  the  time  and  whither  it  tended, 
I  still  was  carrying  out  into  reality  the  true  pur- 
pose of  my  existence.  The  total  round  of  life  with- 
in was  simply  drawing  one  of  its  largest  arcs  with- 
out. As  I  trod  contemplatively  the  steamer's  deck, 
the  first  sunset  on  the  boundless  ocean,  when  the 
ship  had  lost  sight  of  land,  made  me  feel  the  depth 
of  my  present  crisis,  so  that  I  jotted  down:  "I 
have  come  to  the  end  of  something  and  now  I  am 
beginning  something  else ;  but  what  it  is,  I  cannot 
tell."  So  I  rode  over  the  seas  peering  out  for  that 
future  of  me  which  my  whole  life,  still  implicit  in 
me,  had  to  unfold  to  its  fullness,  whereof  I  am 
here  trying  to  give  some  account.  For  now  I  can 
see  what  I  was  then  about,  inasmuch  it  has  attained 
a  certain  fulfilment  in  the  deed,  which  is  fairly 
discernible  and  describable. 


RENASCENCE.  227 

What,  therefore,  was  I  seeking  to  accomplish 
during  this  whole  generation  filled  with  middle 
life's  best?  Can  I  summarize  in  a  far-hintful  con- 
cept that  long  sweep  of  the  busy  years,  each  of 
which  is  full  of  its  own  separate  details  ?  As  far  as 
I  may  be  able  to  construe  my  own  life-task,  I  would 
recreate  within  myself,  express  in  speech  by  voice 
and  print  and  impart  to  others  whom  I  might  get 
to  hearken  and  to  read,  the  cultural  evolution  of 
man.  This  considerable  labor  I  dared  tackle  in  my 
own  limited  environment,  and  perform  to  the  ex- 
tent of  my  powers.  The  race's  civilization  I  was  to 
re-live  and  make  mine ;  then  I  was  to  formulate 
it  anew  in  my  own  terms,  whereby  I  might  be  able 
to  share  my  best  with  the  like-minded.  Or,  to  em- 
ploy a  different  nomenclature  for  the  somewhat 
elusive  thought,  the  "World-Spirit  as  manifested  in 
and  over  the  course  of  human  History  I  was  to 
appropriate  mentally,  then  to  express  in  my  own 
speech,  that  I  might  give  away  my  excellence  if  I 
had  any  to  give. 

The  three  portions  of  this  life-task,  or  its  three 
duties  may  be  briefly  categorized:  (1)  Acquisi- 
tion, or  the  getting  to  know;  (2)  Expression  or 
the  forming  what  you  know;  (3)  Impartation,  or 
the  giving  away  what  you  know. 

For  me,  as  this  living  individual  existence  at  a 
certain  place,  in  a  limited  time,  and  under  a  given 
social  and  institutional  order,  the  second  of  these 
parts  was  and  still  is  the  most  significant  and  im- 
perative; that  is,  mine  is  the  supreme  need  of  ex- 


228    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

pression.  Such  a  part,  accordingly,  is  that  of  a 
mediator,  a  gospeller,  or  perchance  an  evangelist, 
whose  function  is  to  become  in  a  small  way  or 
large,  the  voice  of  all  time  to  his  own  time,  to 
unite  self-expression  and  world-expression  in  the 
one  act  of  utterance. 

And  now  with  this  general  outlook  upon  what  I 
call  my  Middle  Period,  embracing  inner  develop- 
ment, literary  production,  and  active  promulga- 
tion, I  wish  to  recur  to  the  statement  of  it  as  a 
continuous  Renascence  of  myself,  and  along  with 
me  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement.  Neither  of  the 
twain  can  escape  the  other,  so  intergrown  have  we 
become,  though  I  am  not  by  any  means  the  whole 
Movement.  Others,  indeed  many  others,  contrib- 
uted to  it  their  own  distinct  lines  of  achievement; 
and  still  more  may  yet  take  the  chance  of  adding 
to  it  somewhat  of  their  work,  worth,  and  word. 

But  of  this  long  and  complex  Period  there  should 
be  subordinate  groupings  or  stages  with  their  land- 
ing-places as  joints  of  the  total  organism.  So  in  my 
purview  I  think  I  can  discern  three  considerable 
sweeps  or  waves  with  rise  and  fall  over  this  sea 
of  time,  which  reveal  in  outer  form  the  inner  pro- 
cess going  forward  in  the  soul  of  the  man  and  the 
movement.  That  is,  of  the  one  grand  Renascence 
there  are  three  lesser  Renascences,  which  may  be 
measured  from  crest  to  crest,  somehow  as  follows: 

First  is  The  Renascence  torn,  or  The  Classical 
Renascence;  the  Epoch  of  the  acquisition  of  Greek 
Spirit,  with  its  varied  expression  in  Art,  Litera- 


RENASCENCE.  229 

ture  and  Philosophy.  This  is  the  prime  germinal 
deed,  the  fruitful  embryonic  Renascence  of  all 
future  Renascences.  Here,  then,  is  the  genetic 
starting-point  of  the  Period,  which  in  my  case  con- 
tinued some  seven  or  eight  years  (1877  till  1884-5). 

Second  is  the  Renascence  evolved  and  propa- 
gated, or  its  double  development.  That  is,  it  moves 
along  two  distinct,  yet  parallel  lines:  on  the  one 
line  runs  its  internal  growth  till  it  embraces  all 
four  Literary  Bibles  together  with  my  expression 
of  them  in  writ  and  print ;  on  the  other  line  runs 
its  external  dissemination  in  various  forms  (lec- 
ture, class,  school,  the  communal  institute).  Now 
the  seed  has  to  be  sown  far  and  wide,  which  calls 
for  a  time  of  wandering  in  the  propagator  or  mis- 
sionary, along  with  elaboration,  extension,  and  ex- 
pression of  the  work.  This  Epoch,  full  of  journey- 
ings  interspersed  with  a  number  of  writings,  lasted 
toward  a  dozen  years  (1884-5  till  1895-6). 

Third  is  The  Psychological  Renascence,  or  the 
New  Birth  of  the  Psyche,  Self,  Ego,  which  has 
hitherto  secretly  lurked  and  wrought  in  the  fore- 
going Renascence,  but  now  becomes  explicit,  un- 
folding itself  into  its  own  forms  through  its  own 
activity,  and  so  making  its  own  new  science.  Thus 
that  which  created  the  previous  Renascence  is  now 
to  create  itself,  or  is  to  bring  forth  its  own  Renas- 
cence, whereby  it  passes  from  appropriating  or 
fabricating  alien  forms  for  itself,  (such  as  Art, 
Literature,  Philosophy)  to  producing  and  ordering 
its  own  native  form  for  itself,  with  all  the  varied 


230    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

manifestations  of  the  same — such  we  name  The 
Psychological  Renascence.  The  course  of  the  pres- 
ent Epoch  at  its  beginning  may  be  dated  about 
1895-6,  and  continues  for  a  decade  and  more. 

So  this  total  Renascence  rounds  itself  out  when 
it  returns  into  itself  from  other-creating  to  self- 
creating.  Thus  too  it  has  periodized  itself  in  its 
long  evolution  lasting  some  thirty  years.  The 
general  sweep  has  been  in  this  wise :  from  Philos- 
ophy, through  the  Classical  world  and  its  evolu- 
tion, to  Psychology.  All  this  seems  a  strange  de- 
velopment or  education  of  a  human  soul,  but  it  is 
mine,  being  my  life's  achievement,  and  constitut- 
ing that  which  I  truly  am,  my  very  individuality. 
Of  course  the  more  significant  details  of  this  long 
process  are  to  be  set  forth  in  the  account  which  fol- 
lows. But  here  let  us  add  that  not  only  the  old 
Greek  seed  is  to  be  re-planted,  but  a  new  kind  of 
seed  is  to  be  evolved;  Man's  Renascence  has  now 
to  take  place  not  merely  in  and  through  its  outer 
expression  (Art,  Literature,  Philosophy),  but 
turns  to  the  inner  creative  Self,  which  must  hence- 
forth make  its  own  expression  in  a  new  science 
(Universal  Psychology).  Whereof  the  full  expo- 
sition lies  quite  a  distance  ahead  of  us. 

Thus  in  vague  foreshadowy  outlines  the  reader 
may  glimpse  the  sweep  of  the  present  Period  with 
its  three  Chapters  or  Epochs.  Of  course  my  in- 
separable companion  in  all  these  rounds  was  the 
St.  Louis  Movement,  not  St.  Louis  herself,  who 
did  not  go  along,  but  seemed  to  sink  down  into  a 


RENASCENCE.  231 

strange  barren  lethargy  during  these  years.  As 
for  me  in  this  crisis,  I  had  to  separate  not  only  from 
my  urban  life  but  from  my  American  or  Occidental 
world,  and  flee  to  its  opposite  on  the  other  side  of 
our  earth-ball,  that  I  might  win  my  spirit's  Renas- 
cence, I  in  person  beholding  the  Hellenic  folk  in 
person,  talking  with  it  in  its  own  primal  spon- 
taneous dialect,  thereby  taking  up  its  first  creative 
soul  into  mine,  whereupon  I  could  return  home 
and  give  out  whatever  of  worth  I  had  brought 
back,  to  those  who  might  feel  the  same  need  of  a 
New  Birth. 

Nor  could  I  stop  and  settle  down  contented  with 
my  mere  appropriation  of  the  most  beautiful  and 
best  in  the  world — that  were  indeed  the  death,  not 
of  it  but  of  me.  So  I  had  to  impart  in  order  to  be. 
And  not  only  impart  through  the  voice  but  through 
the  pen — this  being  the  eternal  impartation.  And 
still  further,  the  thing  imparted  and  penned  must 
be  the  Eternal  as  adjudged  by  the  Tribunal  of  the 
Ages.  So  I  chose  the  Literary  Bibles  of  the  Race 
as  the  true  vehicle  for  my  own  ever-renewing 
Renascence  as  well  as  for  that  of  my  time. 

I  may  here  append  that  this  cultural  Renascence 
(as  it  can  be  qualified)  is  not  merely  mine,  but 
also  the  world's;  and  the  world's  cultural  Rena- 
scence had  its  start  in  time  and  place  as  well  as 
mine,  and  the  latter  must  be  nourished  from  the 
former.  In  other  words,  the  race's  civilization  is 
the  prime  genetic  source  of  the  spiritual  training 
of  the  individual.    So  I  must  be  culturally  re-born 


232    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

from  my  race's  first  cultural  fountain,  which  is  an- 
cient Hellas  whose  Nascence  is  the  original  well- 
head of  all  Renascences  since  then — Latin,  Italian, 
German,  French,  Shakespearian,  Goethean,  and 
perchance  American.  Indeed  our  last  world-poet, 
Goethe,  has  become  conscious  of  this  fact  and  has 
poetically  set  forth  his  own  as  well  as  his  time's 
Renascence  springing  out  of  the  old  Hellenic  spirit, 
in  the  Second  Part  of  his  Faust — the  truly  proph- 
etic Part  of  his  poem,  and  the  one  yet  to  be  real- 
ized. Moreover  he  lived  this  Renascence,  starting 
with  his  Italian  Journey,  and  evolving  it  after  his 
return  and  expressing  it  in  verse  and  prose.  And 
every  man,  great  and  small,  is  to  pass  through 
somewhat  of  the  same  process,  if  he  wishes  to  win 
an  universal  culture.  So  I  from  my  little  far-away 
nest  make  a  journey  to  antique  Hellas  for  its 
eternally  creative  Renascence. 

Let  me  again  emphasize  that  the  significance  and 
the  sweep  of  this  renascent  starting-point  lay 
wholly  unconscious  within  me  from  its  first  germ- 
ination, and  that  it  unfolded  itself  according  to  its 
own  native  law  of  growth.  And  remember  that  I 
am  now  trying  to  trace  its  course  through  the 
perspective  of  a  life-time. 


CHAPTER  FIRST 

The  Classical  Renascence 

tFirst  it  was  a  flight  on  my  own  part  to  the 
immediate  outer  locality  of  Rome  and  Greece,  and 
to  the  external  sense-arts  of  which  they  were  the 
masters  and  transmitters.  So  I  became  a  fugitive 
from  too  much  of  philosophy,  poetry,  music  of  the 
introverted  North  to  the  architecture,  sculpture, 
painting  of  the  extroverted  South.  I  had  begun 
to  feel  myself  painfully  but  a  half  of  our  whole 
Human  Nature  at  its  highest  achievement ;  hence 
I  quite  instinctively  made  a  move  to  complete  my- 
self by  seeking  the  other  moiety  of  me  in  its  sunny 
home  by  the  Midland  Sea.  I  migrated  like  the 
fowls  of  the  air,  when  my  winter  came  upon  me, 
toward  the  summer  clime  both  of  space  and  of 
spirit.  Or  from  my  modern  one-sided  Teutonic 
development  of  more  than  a  decade,  I  reacted  to 
the  antique  Mediterranean  culture  of  Classic 
times.  I  repeat,  this  break  came  of  no  conscious 
intention ;  it  was  the  spontaneous  thrust  of  the 
incomplete  soul  struggling  to  make  itself  com- 
plete ;  it  was  the  entire  life  of  my  race,  born  with- 
in me  the  implicit,  as  it  is  in  every  man,  pushing 
to  become  the  explicit  and  real.  Thus  at  present  I 
construe  to  myself  my  instinctive  drive  to  the  cul- 
tural Past  of  my  race.  \ 
233 


234    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

This  Classical  Epoch,  as  I  call  it,  lasted  dis- 
tinctively some  eight  years,  as  the  dominant  fac- 
tor of  my  activity,  beginning  in  1877,  with  my  first 
step  toward  Europe  across  the  Mississippi,  and 
continuing  till  1884-5,  when  another  and  greater 
interest  subordinated  but  did  not  destroy  it  by 
any  means.  During  this  time  the  Greek  world  was 
uppermost  with  me  in  thought,  instruction  and 
literary  creation.  Three  different  localities,  each 
with  its  task  and  its  training,  play  into  and 
through  this  Epoch:  Europe,  St.  Louis,  Concord, 
whereof  now  we  are  to  give  the  account. 

The  St.  Louis  Movement  had  also  its  Classical 
phasis,  which  differed  a  good  deal  with  different 
members.  Brockmeyer,  our  President,  was  not 
without  some  trace  of  Greek,  which  he  picked  up  at 
Georgetown  College  and  Brown  University,  both 
of  which  he  attended  as  an  undergraduate.  But  I 
never  saw  him  look  at  or  cite  a  Greek  text.  Still 
he  showed  a  keen  appreciation  of  Classic  form,  es- 
pecially as  revealed  in  the  dramas  of  Sophocles,  of 
which  the  Antigone  was  his  favorite.  I  have  heard 
him  say,  that  the  only  true  Art  is  the  Classic,  and 
he  belittled  the  distinction  into  Symbolic  and  Ro- 
mantic Arts  of  his  master  Hegel.  He  gave  me  a 
great  surprise  in  his  old-age  when  he  wished  me  to 
study  with  him  Aristotle  in  Greek,  saying  he  could 
easily  brush  up  his  former  knowledge  of  the 
tongue.  We  never  started,  and  in  a  year  or  two 
he  had  passed  away  of  himself  into  the  Elysian 
Fields,  and  left  me  behind. 


THE  CLASSICAL  RENASCENCE.  235 

Harris  studied  the  old  Greek  philosophers  some- 
what in  the  original,  and  he  would  cite  rather  tot- 
teringly  now  and  then  certain  brief  Greek  philo- 
sophic terms,  like  the  Aristotelian  Nous  poieticos. 
Greek  poetry  I  do  not  think  he  cared  for.  But 
antique  Sculpture  he  worked  at  theoretically  a 
good  deal;  especially  I  remember  his  elaborate 
study  of  the  Venus  of  Milo  with  illustrative  draw- 
ings. In  the  main,  however,  he  took  his  Hellenism 
at  second  hand,  namely  from  Hegel,  who  for  real 
mastery  was  one  of  the  greatest  of  modern  Hellen- 
ists in  the  sphere  of  Aesthetics  as  well  as  in  that 
of  pure  Philosophy. 

But  confessedly  the  transcendent  Grecian  both 
as  to  erudition  and  activity  among  us  and  in  the 
whole  town  was  Thomas  Davidson,  our  professor 
of  Greek  in  the  High  School,  graduate  of  Aberdeen 
University,  Scotland.  He  would  even  claim  upon 
occasion  to  be  a  Classic  Heathen  in  religion;  I 
once  heard  him  at  Rome  berate  modern  Christian 
degeneracy,  as  we  paced  the  world-tragical  ruins 
of  the  Villa  Hadriana.  He  was  very  learned,  and 
had  read  much  of  old  Greek  poetry,  though  I  never 
knew  him  to  allude  to  the  Greek  historians, 
Herodotus  and  Thucydides,  who  meant  so  much  to 
me.  His  overflowing  knowledge  streamed  mainly 
into  the  literary  and  the  etymological  channels  at 
this  time.  There  is  no  doubt  he  stirred  up  a  good 
deal  of  interest  in  the  community  by  his  public  lec- 
tures and  discussions  on  Greek  topics.  His  dis- 
course on  Aristotle  read  at  the  University  Club  was 


236    TEE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

the  triumph  of  the  season.  By  way  of  opposition 
to  our  Hegelians,  he  adopted  Aristotelianism,  for 
Davidson  could  not  help  being  contradictory  and 
critical — delighting  far  more  to  kick  in  the  traces 
than  to  pull  the  load. 

After  his  stay  in  St.  Louis,  Davidson  went  to 
Greece  in  order  to  drink  at  the  first  sources  of  his 
favorite  Hellenic  antiquities.  "When  I  was  at  Rome 
in  1878,  who  should  appear  at  my  quarters  one  day 
but  my  old  associate  of  the  St.  Louis  High  School, 
Thomas  Davidson,  now  in  a  retreat  from  his  once 
dear  Hellas  back  to  the  "West.  He  told  me  much 
about  Athens  in  response  to  my  questions,  for  I 
had  already  made  up  my  mind  to  go  thither  my- 
self. I  found  him  a  good  deal  disillusioned  in  re- 
gard to  his  former  Greek  ideals  or  idols;  the  old 
enthusiasm  was  not  wholly  gone,  but  seemed  de- 
cidedly on  the  wane.  He  declined  going  with  me 
to  the  Vatican  Museum  for  a  survey  of  its  Greek 
treasures,  of  which  he  had  once  been  the  student 
and  the  adorer,  and  over  which  I  longed  to  hear 
him  expatiate  with  his  old  learned  exuberance. 

Davidson  deserves  the  credit  of  having  aroused 
quite  a  thrill  of  communal  interest  in  the  Greek 
classics  during  his  stay  in  rather  stolid  unclassic 
St.  Louis  (about  eight  years  1867-1875,  if  I  re- 
member the  dates  correctly).  He  excited  a  per- 
sonal fascination  in  his  own  right,  as  well  as  won- 
der at  his  unusual  erudition.  But  Davidson  had 
no  creative  gift,  he  left  no  reproduction  of  the 
Greek  spirit  to  live  after  him,  or  of  any  other.  "We 


THE  CLASSICAL  RENASCENCE.  237 

were  all  shocked  by  the  damnatory  bitterness  which 
saturated  his  essay  on  the  Frieze  of  the  Parthenon; 
very  one-sided  also  was  his  view,  I  thought,  and  he 
showed  himself  in  angry  reaction  against  his  for- 
mer German  tendency  at  St.  Louis.  On  my  travels 
I  once  met  a  distinguished  archeologist  who  had 
made  a  special  study  of  the  ancient  Greek  sculptor 
Phidias,  and  I  asked  him :  "Have  you  ever  crossed 
the  path  of  our  friend  Mr.  Thomas  Davidson?" 
His  smile  soured  at  once  into  a  scowl,  as  he  hissed 
out:  "No,  and  I  do  not  wish  to  see  him,  he  has 
slandered  the  greatest  teacher  of  my  science," 
meaning  probably  Overbeck  of  Leipzig.  This  hints 
the  chief  fatality  of  the  man,  who  negatives  all, 
and  in  the  same  act  particularly  himself. 

Still  Davidson  had  not  a  few  excellent  qualities, 
and  his  career  kept  a  strange  tendency  to  inter- 
lace with  mine  at  certain  points  for  many  years — 
his  love  of  the  Classical  world  being  the  deepest 
and  most  enduring  of  our  common  attachments. 
He  will  appear  repeatedly  with  the  years  in  the 
course  of  the  present  narrative,  and  play  his  chosen 
part  of  the  advocatus  diaboli,  which  was  indeed  his 
office  in  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  of  whose  famous 
members  he  was  one,  being  also  distinguished  as 
the  most  restless  globe-rounder  of  us  all. 

As  for  me,  by  way  of  contrast  with  Davidson,  I 
can  say  that  my  visit  to  Greece  brought  no  disillu- 
sion, but  rather  increased  my  Classical  devotion, 
and  certainly  stimulated  my  creativity,  whatever 
that  may  be  worth.    I  felt  the  strongest  desire  to 


238    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

reproduce  the  Greek  spirit  in  mine,  and  then  to 
make  it  speak  my  own  tongue  for  my  self-expres 
sion,  which  might  also  have  some  meaning  for 
others.  To  discover  Hellas  afresh,  to  recreate  it 
in  new  forms,  and  thus  to  impart  it,  will  be  the 
occupation  of  what  I  here  call  the  Classical  Epoch 
of  myself  and  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  which,  I 
may  here  testify,  never  failed  to  shadow  me  all 
through  my  wanderings. 

Let  me  then  emphasize  that  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment along  with  myself  is  now  to  have  its  Classical 
Renascence  (or  Renaissance,  if  you  prefer  Ithe 
French  word)  ;  we  both  are  to  take  a  dip  back  into 
the  old  Greek  world,  which  always  brings  a  new 
cultural  birth  to  the  individual  and  his  age,  re- 
bearing  and  transfiguring  all  the  formal  knowledge 
and  the  oft-rehearsed  texts  which  make  up  the 
grind  of  the  much-worn  drill-mill  of  College  and 
University.  We  are  now  bound  for  the  actual  liv- 
ing Hellas,  unparadigmed  and  unmummied,  for 
the  very  center  of  it,  for  the  top  of  Parnassus  it- 
self. Let  the  watchful  reader  see  if  we  get  there. 
Good-bye,  we  are  off,  both  of  us,  for  the  St.  Louis 
Movement  is  going  along. 

I 

The  Classical  Itineeary 

tAlready  I  have  alluded  to  my  somewhat  ex- 
tended European  Journey  as  the  new  starting- 
point  of  my  later  life.    It  is  the  overture  to  all  of 


THE  CLASSICAL  ITINERARY.  239 

me  that  follows  till  I  am  played  out  to  the  last 
note.  Can  I  give  this  Journey  in  one  brief  con- 
centrated action  which  will  show  the  whole  of  it 
in  a  single  image  beforehand  for  the  reader  ?  Con- 
ceive me  now  breaking  away  from  St.  Louis  and 
moving  in  a  line  of  ascent  up  a  mountain,  rounding 
quite  this  our  side  of  the  earth-ball,  through  many 
laborious  months,  till  I  reach  the  top  and  take  my 
goal's  prospect  there  at  leisure;  then,  soulfully 
satisfied,  I  run  rapidly  down  the  same  path  back 
to  the  prime  departing  point,  St.  Louis.  Such  is 
the  long  cycle  or  rather  loup  which  I  make  in  toil- 
some practice,  but  which  I  now  seek  to  compress 
into  one  fleet-visioned  snapshot  of  mind  as  a  sort 
of  outline  for  the  future. 

Let  me  add  that  this  mountain  peak  attained  by 
me  was  a  real  visible  object,  none  other, than  the 
Greek  Parnassus,  which  has  upheld  and  still  up- 
holds its  marvelous  ideal  or  universal  counterpart 
ever  floating  down  the  ages  and  round  the  globe. 
I  can  stoutly  affirm  that  no  such  objective,  when  I 
rode  across  the  Mississippi  bridge,  lay  in  my 
farthest-winged  flight  of  fancy.  In  fact,  I  hardly 
knew  where  I  was  till  I  got  there,  and  looked 
around.  After  some  full  days  of  delighted  circum- 
spection, I  knew  that  the  time  was  up,  I  had 
reached  the  original  source  of  what  I  came  for. 
Then  I  sprang  down  hill  homeward. 

Similar  small  turns  or  loups  I  had  pre-enacted 
several  times  on  my  main  line  of  ascent.    One  of 


240    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

these^  the  most  impressive  to  me,  I  may  recount. 
Italy  I  could  not  leave  without  going  to  the  top  of 
Vesuvius,  and  looking  into,  perchance  descending 
into,  its  ever-menacing  crater  which  had  shortly 
before  had  a  furious  eruption.  Several  hours  it 
tasked  me  to  toil  up  through  yielding  ashes  and 
scoriae  to  the  top  of  the  steep  cone,  where  I  saw 
and  even  fondled  the  monster,  asleep  indeed,  but 
still  breathing  heavily  with  occasional  grunts  of 
fire  and  lava.  Then  I  leaped  down  the  cone  in  as 
many  minutes  as  previously  it  took  me  hours  to  go 
up.  So  the  old  Roman  poet  sang  of  Avernus, 
Facilis  descensus. 

It  will  be  in  place  now,  I  think,  to  mention 
briefly  what  was  the  fulfilment  which  I  experi- 
enced at  the  last  stage  of  my  Classical  Journey. 
I  felt  that  the  Parnassian  life,  which  still  actually 
existed  quite  in  its  primitive  simplicity,  was  the 
original  well-head,  the  germinal  reality  of  the  Art 
and  its  spirit  which  I  first  glimpsed  at  London  in 
the  Elgin  Marbles,  and  tracked  through  France, 
Italy,  Greece,  till  here  I  had  reached  at  last  its 
native  fountain  in  the  actual  folk.  On  this  spot, 
then,  I  seemed  to  have  come  upon  the  small,  but 
still  living  cell  of  Classical  civilization,  pre- 
Athenian,  pre-Homeric  perchance,  certainly  proto- 
Hellenic.  That  antique  Tradition  which  I  had 
learned  at  school  as  dead,  I  here  found  alive  in  its 
primal,  quite  microscopic  stage,  out  of  which  the 
old  Greek  culture  evolved  and  has  continued  down 
the  ages  till  the  present  moment. 


THE  CLASSICAL  ITINERARY.  241 

But  along  this  outstretched  line  of  travel  of 
many  months,  what  was  I  to  do?  It  must  be  ac- 
knowledged that  my  hardest  labor  lay  on  the  way, 
not  at  the  close— the  getting,  not  the  gotten.  For 
I  had  to  clamber  through  the  vast  ruins  of  an- 
tiquity scattered  from  one  end  of  Europe  to  the 
other.  As  I  viewed  the  wrecks  of  a  past  civiliza- 
tion, what  was  to  be  my  attitude?  I  would  re- 
store them  within  me  to  their  original  form  and 
life,  not  only  as  isolated  works  but  in  their  total 
compass  and  environment ;  indeed,  I  would  try  to 
revivify  through  them  the  sunken  social  order 
which  produced  them,  resurrecting  it  at  least  in  my 
own  spirit.  For  instance,  when  I  contemplated  the 
huge  torso  of  Hercules  in  the  Vatican  Museum  at 
Rome,  the  problem  bade  me  thus:  "Complete  it, 
reproduce  it,  as  it  once  was;  see  the  fragment  of 
the  hero  sitting  there  headless,  armless,  nearly  leg- 
less; be  it  thine  to  make  him  whole  in  thy  soul's 
sculpture.  Go  back  and  live  in  that  old  Greek 
statuary's  workshop,  and  there  recreate  in  thine 
own  way  his  Art.  But  that  is  not  all:  through 
this  statue  and  its  Art  and  the  necessary  presup- 
positions of  that  Art,  thou  must  reproduce  the  so- 
cial structure  antique,  which  called  forth  such  a 
work  for  its  self-expression.  In  truth  thou  hast  to 
behold  the  entire  Olympian  Pantheon  coming  down 
and  taking-on  their  beautiful  plastic  shapes  just 
here  in  this  Vatican  Museum,  in  whose  walls  they 
have  been  carefully  imprisoned  by  the  Pope  as  the 
sovereign  of  the  new  order  which  has  conquered 


242    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

them.  Thine  it  is  now  to  be  present  at  the  resur- 
rection of  the  Gods." 

So  it  happens  in  this  Classical  Itinerary  that  I 
must  for  a  time  become  a  ruin  like  the  Coliseum, 
like  the  Parthenon,  yea  like  all  Rome,  like  all 
Athens,  re-living  in  myself  also  the  fates  of  those 
ancient  edifices  and  of  their  cities.  Then  I  have  in 
spirit  to  make  myself  over  into  these  old  mutilated 
torsos,  and  to  re-feel  the  stroke  of  destiny  which 
smote  them  to  these  remnants  of  a  once  great  and 
beautiful  completeness.  Can  I  sense  the  blow 
which  knocked  off  the  head  of  this  Hercules,  or  the 
fall  which  broke  the  arm  of  yon  Venus  ?  Methinks 
that  I  must  even  die  with  this  dead  world  in  order 
to  resurrect  it  in  myself,  and  there  possibly  re- 
create it  in  a  form  of  my  own. 

For  all  antiquity,  Greece  and  Rome,  as  well  as 
their  greatest  individuals,  had  a  tragic  outcome  of 
existence.  We  feel  their  doom  still  as  we  wander 
through  their  beautiful  and  often  colossal  ruins. 
"We  ask  what  was  their  deed  which  evoked  such  an 
awful  judgment.  That,  too,  must  be  fearfully  wit- 
nessed and  profoundly  realized  both  in  heart  and 
in  thought,  as  one  travels  through  the  scenes  of 
this  Classical  Journey.  What  is  the  Lacoon  but 
the  Greek  man  and  even  his  Gods,  yea  his  very 
Zeus,  fated  ?  So  I  sauntered  along  the  time-stream 
of  History  and  beheld  the  tragedy  of  tragedies, 
that  of  a  whole  world  and  its  civilization.  Yet  per- 
chance just  now  a  mightier  world-tragedy  than 
that  of  antiquity  is  being  enacted  before  our  eyes — 


THE  CLASSICAL  ITINERARY.  243 

not  the  partial  Greek  or  Roman  one  but  that  of 
total  Europe  sinking  under  its  long  accrued  tragic 
guilt. 

Nevertheless,  through  all  this  death  I  am  going 
back  to  life.  The  old  chorus  consisting  of  dance 
and  song  and  drama  in  one,  is  still  leaping  with 
youthful  freshness  in  Greece,  though  it  seems  al- 
ready remote  and  somewhat  artificial  in  early 
Aeschylus  and  Pindar.  Many  a  turn  of  the  an- 
cient Mythus  I  heard  in  living  words  still  spoken 
through  the  vales  of  Parnassus.  Even  the  real 
breathing  model  of  the  Faun  of  Praxiteles  I  saw 
or  fancied  I  saw  standing  in  the  Delphic  sunlight. 
Every  statue  of  that  artist's  Faun  housed  up  in 
the  galleries  of  to-day  is  said  to  be  some  copy  of 
the  lost  original;  but  I  throbbed  with  joy  at  the 
thought  of  looking  on  the  original  of  the  old  sculp- 
tor's original,  his  very  model  breathing  still  and 
basking  in  the  free  mountain  air  of  sunny  Parnas- 
sus. Such  I  acclaimed  my  native  Dimitri,  as  he 
stood  before  me  mid  his  pasturing  flock.  So  I 
travel  back  in  time  through  a  ruinous,  fragmentary, 
scattered  world  to  its  earliest  bud,  which  is  still 
alive  and  bursting  into  fresh  flowerage  just  now 
and  every  day.  "When  I  realize  fully  this  fact, 
what  I  call  my  Delphic  Moment,  long  forefelt,  has 
actually  arrived,  and  my  own  Classical  inflores- 
cence has  appeared  and  given  its  spiritual  guerdon. 
Then  I  turn  about  and  face  westward,  whence  I 
came,  bearing  with  me  what  spoils  I  have  been  able 
to  cull  and  to  carry  off  in  the  course  of  my  Jour- 


244    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

ney,  of  which  I  may  here  add  a  few  of  the  salient 
details  compiled  with  some  care  into  a  book  show- 
ing a  timed  succession  of  epistles  from  ancient 
places.  A  Tour  in  Europe — such  is  the  name  of 
the  mentioned  book  in  which  I  have  gathered  the 
ripest  fruits  of  my  enterprise,  after  rejecting  the 
cruder  stuff  of  many  neetingly  jotted  memoranda. 
Considerable  heaps  of  the  traveler's  literary  litter 
were  flung  back  into  chaos  whence  they  had  es- 
caped with  the  better  harvest;  still  a  few  transi- 
tory note-books  survive  awaiting  their  doom. 

The  aforesaid  book  remains,  accordingly,  in  the 
form  of  successive  letters,  into  which  I  condensed 
my  capital  experiences,  as  I  journeyed  along  their 
ascending  line  till  they  reached  the  apex  already 
described.  The  manuscript  written  on  the  spot 
dates  from  first  to  last  through  the  years  1877- 
1879 ;  the  printing  of  it  took  place  in  1907.  Thus 
the  book  lay  hid  in  the  author's  drawer  for  nearly 
thirty  years,  during  the  entire  middle  Period  of 
life.  Finally  the  psychologic  moment  (as  they 
call  it  now)  struck  when  it  insisted  on  being  at 
least  put  into  type,  though  it  was  never  published 
in  the  strict  sense  of  the  deed.  As  a  legitimate 
child  of  my  brain,  though  long  neglected,  it  had  a 
right  to  its  inheritance  of  print,  whereby  it  could 
voice  its  thought  and  its  heart  to  the  reader  who 
might  care. 

This  is  the  first  and  only  book  of  mine  which 
took  an  epistolary  form.  On  the  whole  I  do  not 
like  to  write  letters ;  therein  I  have  been  a  laggard 


THE  CLASSICAL  ITINERARY.  245 

all  my  years,  belabored  by  many  justifiable  com- 
plaints. But  these  short  daily  communications  to 
my  distant  friends  compelled  me  to  put  together 
and  to  condense  my  scattered  sight-seeings  and  my 
random  note-scribblings  into  a  compacter  writ.  The 
result  was  they  took  a  native  shape  which  could  not 
be  broken  without  losing  their  character.  So  I  let 
them  stay  in  print  quite  as  they  once  dashed  in 
wild  freedom  through  my  pen  over  my  papery 
prairie. 

London  was  my  first  halting-place.  It  was  hid 
in  its  winter  overcoat  of  fog,  and  refused  to  let  it- 
self be  seen  for  days  at  a  time ;  so  I  was  driven  into 
two  large  edifices  where  things  could  be  observed 
by  gaslight.  In  the  National  Gallery  I  studied  the 
paintings,  especially  those  of  Turner.  Then  I 
passed  to  the  British  Museum,  in  which  was  housed 
Classic  Art,  and  I  soon  centered  upon  the  Elgin 
Marbles.  Still  I  worked  hard  at  Turner,  having 
previously  read  Ruskin,  with  great  admiration  for 
his  style  but  with  small  respect  for  his  thought. 
The  gorgeous  colors  of  the  English  painter  daz- 
zled, and  I  tried  to  believe  in  him,  but  very  fanatic- 
ally I  could  not.  Will  he  signify  anything  great 
and  permanent  in  the  march  of  the  ages?  The 
Oracle  was  silent,  and  I  thought  shook  his  head. 
Then  I  turned  to  consult  the  statues  of  the  Par- 
thenon, here  in  a  kind  of  exile,  and  I  received  the 
oracular  nod  to  seek  their  birth-place  for  my  fu- 
ture salvation.  So  I  started  with  a  somewhat  more 
conscious  pace  toward  my  Renascence. 


246    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

Paris  was  the  next  stop,  the  gaudy  urban  en- 
chantress of  the  world.  Behold  now  the  sullen  fog 
cleared  away,  and  the  sun  laughing  with  his  earthly 
children  once  more.  Here  two  centers  of  attrac- 
tion tied  me  fast  for  five  weeks.  The  first  was 
French  Literature,  with  which  the  very  atmosphere 
of  Paris  seemed  to  be  overcharged  till  it  dripped 
on  the  pavement.  That  was  a  new  and  to  me  a 
very  congenial  experience.  It  was  a  city  more  de- 
voted to  self-expression  than  any  other  on  the  globe 
probably.  Still  in  spite  of  the  charm  of  literary 
Paris,  I  again  chose  Hellas  as  my  goal,  and  kept 
sweet  converse  with  the  sculptured  antiques  of  the 
Louvre  as  my  most  intimate  companions.  Victor 
Hugo  was  still  alive,  but  even  of  him  I  did  not  try 
to  catch  a  living  glimpse.    I  wish  now  I  had. 

Rome  was  the  third  landing  to  which  my  many- 
leagued  boots  bore  me  at  a  single  stride  southward 
high  over  the  white-hatted  Alps  down  through  the 
genial  sheen  of  the  Italian  spring.  March  (1878) 
had  just  begun  when  the  railroad  train  whizzed 
me  through  a  crevice  in  the  old  Roman  wall  past 
a  ruinous  aqueduct,  and  set  me  down  inside  the 
Eternal  City.  Properly  I  had  now  reached  the 
first  goal  of  my  Journey  (not  yet  the  second  or 
the  third).  The  contrast  with  London  and  Paris, 
which  are  essentially  present-lived,  shot  at  once 
into  my  eye,  which  here  beheld  on  all  sides  the 
fragments  of  a  foregone  world.  The  Past  was 
everywhere  in  evidence;  the  very  atmosphere 
seemed   overladen   with   former   greatness.      Rem- 


THE  CLASSICAL  ITINERARY.  247 

nants,  torsos,  ruins,  tragedy  crushed  not  only  into 
outer  vision  but  into  mind  and  feeling.  Not  the 
Coliseum  alone  rose  up  a  fragment,  but  all  Rome 
was  a  ruin  often  mossy-green  and  in  places  even 
flowery  (at  that  time  the  young  Italy  of  Victor 
Immanuel  was  just  budding  into  its  early  spring, 
having  won  its  new-old  capital).  Roman  Spirit 
still  lay  here  a  huge  torso  on  its  seven  hills  like 
that  of  Hercules;  the  Roman  People  '(Populus 
Romanus)  appeared  yet  existent  in  name  and  in 
life,  but  was  the  greatest,  most  impressive  ruin  of 
all  Roman  ruins,  because  a  living  ruin.  What  am 
I  to  do  with  such  a  massive  shattered  world?  Re- 
store, recreate,  and  make  integral  this  broken  Past 
as  a  true  part  of  myself,  else  the  present  European 
discipline  will  be  for  me  in  vain. 

Thus  I  grapple  with  my  desperate  problem,  for 
I  must  actually  be  all  these  Roman  torsos,  and 
likewise  the  one  universal  torso  of  Rome  herself, 
that  I  may  live  out  her  death  and  her  resurrection. 
Daily  I  sit  down  before  her  monumental  works  and 
strive  to  re-create  their  creative  spirit  as  well  as  to 
become  its  downfall,  and  thus  live  anew  and  mas- 
ter my  own  tradition  as  a  child  of  my  race's 
civilization.  Of  which  struggle  the  inquisitive 
reader  can  consult  the  record  in  the  before-men- 
tioned book. 

I  must  not,  however,  omit  one  wholly  unexpected 
hatch  from  my  long  Roman  incubation :  the  Classic 
verse  called  elegiac  with  its  peculiar  hexametral 
cadence.    I  had  never  in  my  life  tried  or  thought 


248    TnE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOKD. 

of  trying  such  a  poetical  venture ;  but  of  a  sudden 
one  day  at  Rome  "fleets  in  at  my  window"  the 
antique  epigram  after  the  model  of  the  old  Greek 
Anthology.  I  obeyed  the  Muse  with  an  incredulous 
titter,  thinking  it  only  to  be  one  of  her  little  mo- 
mentary fantasticalities,  several  of  which  she  had 
already  served  up  to  me  passingly  just  in  the 
Eternal  City.  But  this  present  mood  of  hers  has 
proved  at  least  obdurate,  possibly  eternal,  being 
no  petty  Anacreontic  jet,  or  deftly  intermetered 
Horation  lyric,  in  which  I  had  often  tested  myself 
here  on  the  Classic  terrain.  Moreover,  this  poetical 
bent  of  mine  has  met  with  a  decided  rebuff  even 
from  friends,  who  have  said  it  was  a  great  mis- 
take, I  being  no  poet.  Still  I  have  persisted  in 
giving  literary  form  to  myself  in  my  own  way,  re- 
fusing to  be  recreant  to  my  primordial  right  of 
self-expression,  or  untrue  to  my  Super-vocation, 
which  awaits  no  vote  of  otheis,  not  even  compli- 
mentary. So  the  hexametral  swing,  first  rollicking 
in  me  and  around  me  at  Rome,  has  kept  up  its 
rhythm  in  my  heart  and  in  my  voice  at  intervals 
down  to  the  present  hour  in  thousands  of  verses. 
It  is  one  form  of  that  re-production  of  the  antique 
world  which  flowered  along  the  wayside  of  this 
Classical  Itinerary. 

After  nearly  four  months,  the  hot  weather  of 
Rome  with  its  army  of  fleas  remorseless  in  their 
morsels  of  me,  put  me  to  flight  toward  the  North 
where  I  made  the  German  detour  of  my  Itinerary. 
I  passed  through  the  old  Teutonic  heart  of  Father- 


THE  CLASSICAL  ITINERARY.  249 

land,  and  swam  (on  a  steamboat)  up  and  down  its 
main  artery  of  song  and  story,  the  Rhine  stream. 
I  actually  saw  the  Lorelei  and  hymned  its  legend 
after  Heine,  but  without  the  old  appeal ;  and  when 
I,  crooning  Byron,  looked  up  to  the  Drachenfels, 
Nature's  mad  Gothicism,  I  shrank.  Indeed  I  sur- 
prised myself,  as  I  recognized  how  complete  was  my 
revulsion  against  my  former  German  tendency  in 
St.  Louis,  whose  spell  had  lasted  toward  a  dozen 
years.  I  had  gone  back  to  my  earlier  Romanic  pre- 
ference for  France  and  Italy ;  but  still  more  deeply 
I  had  become  already  intergrown  with  the  Classic 
World,  and  sought  here  just  under  the  Northern 
Star  through  memory  to  recreate  it  in  prose  and 
verse.  No  more  fairyland,  no  more  ballads,  no 
more  rhymes  even,  my  delight  was  to  hymn  elegiac 
stanzas  with  the  hexametral  flow  right  in  the  pres- 
ence of  the  nixes  and  norns  of  the  venerable  Teu- 
tonic Rhine.  Not  ungrateful  was  my  deed,  I  hope ; 
but  such  was  now  the  irrespressible  call  to  round 
out  the  Classic  arc  of  my  life's  fulfilment.  So 
when  the  first  autumnal  leaves  had  begun  to  twirl 
down  upon  the  causeway  of  "Wiesbaden,  I  started 
off  southward  again  for  Rome,  and  then  for  Hellas. 
The  fact  was  I  had  already  felt  that  I  «ould  not 
bring  to  a  close  in  Rome  this  Classical  Itinerary. 
Its  edifices,  its  galleries,  even  its  ruins  pointed  back 
to  a  previous  original  source,  to  the  higher-up 
creative  Hellas.  So  I  set  out  once  more  from  Rom,?. 
now  for  the  South.  I  caught  in  Naples  a  still  liv- 
ing undertone  of  its  old  Greek  origin,  and  pon- 


250    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

dered  in  Pompeii  the  appalling  torso  of  a  whole 
ancient  community,  symbol  of  an  entire  fated 
civilization.  Finally  I  reached  the  templed  home 
of  Athena,  itself  another  antique  torso,  most  beauti- 
ful of  its  kind,  and  still  seated  upon  its  lofty  Acro- 
polis, though  begirt  now  with  harsh  and  homely 
unclassical  modernities.  There  I  take  lodgment 
for  many  moons,  and  start  to  talking  Greek  right 
in  the  Pnyx  and  the  Academe  still  echoing  with 
the  words  of  Demosthenes  and  Plato. 

But  now  I  find  that  Athens  too  points  else- 
whither, it  is  not  my  goal's  last  turnabout.  I  be- 
gin to  feel  the  old  city  had  also  its  antecedent 
aforetime,  its  original  atomic  life-germ.  I  started 
from  St.  Louis  for  the  head-waters  of  the  cultural 
evolution  of  Europe,  and  I  must  keep  up  the  quest. 
People  at  Athens  pointed  out  to  me  on  the  Par- 
nassus an  autochthonous,  pre-Athenian  folk  still 
alive  and  doing  their  day's  little  task  in  their 
primitive  mountain  hamlets.  Thither  accordingly 
I  take  my  way  with  a  premonitory  joy  in  my  heart, 
wandering  quite  by  myself  on  mule-paths  over 
crags  and  dowu  gulches  where  no  wheeled  vehicle 
is  possible. 

I  have  already  indicated  the  result  of  this  my 
last  push  for  the  primordial  home  of  that  Greek 
tradition  which  had  been  very  traditionally  handed 
down  to  me,  an  American  youth  at  a  Western  Col- 
lege, through  thousands  of  years.  The  St.  Louis 
Movement  with  its  anti-traditional  trend  had 
driven  me  to  travel  backward  to  the  earliest  pre- 


THE  CLASSICAL  ITINERARY.  251 

suppositions  of  my  culture,  imposed  upon  me  as  it 
was  and  as  it  had  to  be,  from  without.  I  was  not 
able  to  turn  around  till  I  had  reached  the  original 
source,  perchance  the  elemental  microscopic  gem- 
mule  of  Europe's  civilization.  I  may  here  repeat 
that  when  I  heard  the  horologe  of  my  Classical 
Itinerary  strike  the  Delphic  Moment,  I  faced  about 
and  sailed  rapidly  down  the  time-stream  till  I  once 
more  landed  at  one  of  its  far-western  ports,  named 
St.  Louis,  where  I  now  am  starting  over  on  a  new 
journey. 

This  Delphic  Moment  darted  a  sudden  leave-tak- 
ing sensation  which  insisted  upon  attuning  itself 
within  me  to  a  classic  measure  as  I  shed  my  last 
glance  over  the  Parnassian  landscape.  Conceive 
me,  then  high  up  the  mountain  on  a  little  perch 
overlooking  the  Delphic  vale,  when  the  Moment 
strikes  me  and  I  seize  my  notebook  from  my  pocket 
to  scribble  down  these  verses: 

The   Delphic    Moment 

All  the  year  has  suddenly  bloomed  in  this  day, 
in  this  minute; 
The  whole  world  is  a  flower  fragrantly  blowing 
just  now. 

Every  rise  of  the  Sun  hath  seemed  in  some  joy 
to  look  forward, 
This  is  the  moment  it  saw  far  in  the  glow  of  its 
eye. 


252    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

All  the  days  of  the  year  have  been  climbing  above 
to  this  summit, 
Now  each  tick  of  the  clock  sadly  must  knell  their 
decline. 
But  thy  journey  of  life  has  now  reached  its  most 
beautiful  moment, 
Hold  it  fast  in  thy  heart — that  is  thy  conquest 
of  Time. 

Such  was  the  pivotal  turn  of  my  Classical  Renas- 
cence with  the  slow  journey  forward,  and  the 
swift  sweep  back  homeward.  A  new  curriculum 
(or  spiritual  race-course)  in  the  University  of 
Civilization  it  may  be  regarded,  which  is  yet  to  be 
adopted  into  the  completed  system  of  Higher  Edu- 
cation. That  little  Greek  world  has  shown  itself 
the  creative  prototype  of  all  later  cultural  Renas- 
cences, the  primogeniture  of  Europe's  noblest  sons 
in  Literature,  Art,  Science,  History,  Philosophy. 
And  to  that  regenerative  El  Dorado  I  took  my  pil- 
grimage, walking  through  Hellas  alone  and  afoot 
(monos  kai  pezos,  as  I  had  often  to  explain  to  the 
astonished  and  sometimes  suspicious  Greek  peas- 
ants). It  was  my  second  considerable  soldiering 
campaign,  the  first  being  that  of  the  Civil  War,  in 
which  I  as  an  infantryman  learned  how  to  make 
long  marches,  to  dare  hunger  and  thirst,  and  in  the 
pinch  to  face  fire-arms.  This  Classic  Itinerary, 
especially  the  last  Greek  stage  of  it,  I  never  could 
have  compassed  without  my  testful  experience  of 


THE  CLASSICAL  ITINERARY.  253 

military  life,  which  was  then  still  youthful  in  me, 
being  about  fifteen  years  old. 

When  I  had  gotten  back  to  London,  from  which 
I  had  started  many  months  before,  I  took  occasion 
to  visit  again  the  two  great  art-magnets  of  all  Eng- 
land, centering  in  the  Turner  Pictures  at  the  Na- 
tional Gallery,  and  in  the  Elgin  Marbles  at  the 
British  Museum.     I  had  first  come  to  them  from 
my  abstract  philosophic  studies  eye-thirsty  for  the 
beautiful  plastic  shape,  and  devoured  both  kinds  in 
an  indiscriminate  Bacchic  debauch  of  vision.    But 
how  do  they  appear  to  me  now,  after  my  long  com- 
munion with  formful  South,  darling  of  the  Sun? 
For  Italy  and  Greece  had  been  to  me  one  con- 
tinuous art  gallery,  through  which  I  had  slowly 
wandered    contemplating    their    great    works    and 
stilling  my  long-suppressed  form-hunger.     Again 
the  interrogation  rises:     Which  of  these  two  men 
Turner  or  Phidias,  the  modern  Englishman  or  the 
old  Greek,  has  best  given  us  to  view  the  Eternal? 
Indeed  which  of  the  two  has  already  outlasted  the 
testing  blows  of  old  Time's  trip-hammer?     Harris 
I  had  heard  philosophize  the  Turnerian  iridescence, 
with  a  wonder  hopeful  of  knowledge,  and  I  had 
much  admired  Ruskin's  own  artistry  in  re-paint- 
ing with  words  full  of  rainbows  Turner's  seduct- 
ively chromatic  art.     Still  I  have  to  put  the  ulti- 
mate test :    Which  of  the  two  artists  has  the  crea- 
tive power  to  produce  again  and  again  the  cultural 
Renascence  of  the  race?    Just  now  that  is  what  I 
am  hoping  for  in  myself  and  also  in  the  St.  Louis 


254    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

Movement.  So  I  set  out  from  England  in  my  one- 
sided antique  glow,  without  seeing  Shakespeare's 
Stratford,  home  of  our  most  eternal  modern  man, 
greatest  possibly  of  all  our  greatness.  But  we  need 
not  try  to  anticipate  the  tribunal  of  the  milleniums. 
Yet  alas  for  me !  I  still  am  commiserating  my  lot  on 
account  of  my  lifetime's  penalty  for  a  moment's 
negligence. 

II 

The  St.  Louis  Literary  Classes 

Now  occurs  the  strangest,  suddenest  cultural  up- 
burst  within  my  experience.  It  was  the  almost 
universal  rise  of  independent  clubs  or  classes 
throughout  the  St.  Louis  community  for  the  study 
of  the  masterpieces,  chiefly  literary — wholly  so  as 
far  as  my  horizon  extended.  Something  incalcu- 
lable still  lurks  in  the  phenomenon  after  more  than 
thirty  years  have  passed  in  which  it  has  had  good 
time  to  tell  what  it  meant. 

I  had  scarcely  gotten  home  from  my  European 
Journey  and  settled  down  to  begin  life  anew  in  the 
fall  of  1879  when  people  began  to  come  to  me  as 
a  known  schoolmaster,  and  to  ask  for  some  kind  of 
instruction  in  what  I  had  learned  abroad.  The  first 
gathering,  as  far  as  I  now  recollect  took  place  in 
the  pleasant  and  spacious  parlor  of  an  old  friend 
on  the  South  Side,  a  cultivated  and  traveled  gen- 
tleman who  had  shown  a  special  interest  in  Italy. 
A  considerable  audience  we  succeeded  in  bringing 
together,  to  which  I  read  and  talked  with  some  en- 


THE  ST.  LOUIS  LITERARY  CLASSES.         255 

thusiasm,  I  suppose,  about  scenes  and  glories 
classical.  Two  results  began  to  show  themselves. 
First,  a  book  started  on  its  evolution,  as  I  put 
together  and  wrote  out  my  salient  experiences  in 
Greece:  which  book  not  long  afterward  completed 
itself  and  made  its  little  bow  to  the  public  under 
the  name  of  A  Walk  in  Hellas.  The  second  result 
was  that  a  number  of  people  then  present  wished 
to  make  special  studies  of  the  classical  world, 
about  which  they  had  heard  and  even  read  some- 
what, but  knew  little  worth  while.  Whereupon 
several  small  clubs,  or  rather  classes  (the  latter 
is  the  better  name  for  the  thing)  began  to  nucleate 
and  then  rapidly  to  put  forth  into  button  and 
flower.  They  appealed  to  me  for  instruction,  as 
they  imagined  I  knew  something  about  what  I  had 
just  seen,  at  considerable  expense  of  brawn  and 
brain  and  of  shoe-leather. 

Other  independent  centers  seemed  to  spring  up 
at  once  in  different  parts  of  the  city.  People  whom 
I  never  knew  appeared  before  me  with  the  request 
that  I  take  the  lead  in  their  circle  for  the  study 
of  Homer  or  Shakespeare.  Astounding  to  me  and 
without  parallel  in  my  later  experience  was  and 
remains  the  fact  that  wealthy  high-toned  ladies 
took  zealous  part  in  this  movement,  being  eager 
to  go  to  school  again  and  to  study  the  prescribed 
lesson  at  the  feet  of  the  rather  mannerless  school- 
master. Evening  classes  for  men  occupied  with 
the  day's  business  were  formed;  afternoon  classes 
for  ladies  of  leisure  were  perhaps  in  the  majority ; 


256    TEE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

two-sexed  classes  also  could  not  be  prevented.  I  had 
taken  work  again  in  the  High  School,but  after  little 
more  than  a  year  I  resigned  my  appointed  position 
to  assume  charge  of  what  seemed  to  me  a  greater 
call,  namely  to  be  an  unappointed  professor  in  the 
new  university  of  the  rising  educative  institution, 
perchance  just  the  St.  Louis  Movement. 

Tell  us  now — I  hear  myself  demanding  of  my- 
self— what  were  the  branches  taught,  give  us  the 
curriculum  of  your  young  Academe  of  the  world's 
best  training?  Hardly  a  rigidly  fixed  course  can 
be  pointed  out;  it  was  to  be  free,  self-chosen,  self- 
unfolding.  Still  I  may  give  the  general  trend  and 
center  of  my  prime  endeavor:  the  revival  of  the 
classical  spirit  as  expressed  in  Greek  Literature. 
Homer,  the  fountain  of  Hellenic  culture,  and  per- 
haps the  best  and  completest  single  utterance  of 
it  was  my  chief  text-book ;  to  this  was  added  Greek 
History,  Greek  Drama,  Greek  Art.  I  required 
every  member  to  read  and  to  study  the  assigned 
lesson  in  some  good  translation,  which  was  usually 
designated.  Besides  this  stricter  pedagogy,  I 
would  talk,  read,  and  lecture  generally  on  Greece, 
modern  and  ancient,  interspersed  with  my  fresh 
personal  experiences  of  the  land  and  its  folk.  Nor 
were  my  own  metered  effusions  always  withheld 
out  of  modesty,  for  I  often  thought  them  the  best 
of  my  best,  through  some  born  infatuation  for  my 
poetic  children.  The  ancient  tongues  were  not 
taught  by  me,  I  refused  the  drill  of  grammar  and 
dictionary,  and  of  painful  syntactical  construction ; 


THE  ST.   LOUIS  LITERARY  CLASSES.         257 

whoever  wanted  such  training  must  go  to  the  High 
School  and  College  and  University,  which  were  only 
preparatory  to  this  higher  Institution.  I  sought 
to  compass  in  myself  and  to  impart  to  my  pupils 
that  elusive  entity  called  the  Greek  Spirit,  the  very 
soul  of  the  antique  world. 

Thus  a  strange  cultural  epidemic  broke  out  in 
St.  Louis  and  raged  continuously  for  some  years, 
passing  through  the  usual  stages  of  growth,  cul- 
mination and  decline.  The  period  of  this  peculiar 
Greek  Renascence  in  my  range  lasted  about  six 
years,  say  from  1879  till  1885.  I  of  course  am 
speaking  only  for  myself,  and  to  a  certain  extent 
for  our  St.  Louis  Movement.  There  were  other 
classes  and  other  intellectual  centers  scattered 
through  the  town.  Both  the  Universities  had  their 
own  courses  of  public  lectures,  doubtless  in  re- 
sponse to  the  general  tendency.  I  remember  at- 
tending some  prelections  on  Dante  from  a  Catholic 
viewpoint,  which  were  held  in  the  audience  room 
of  the  Jesuits.  Some  churches  also  had  their  lit- 
erary appendix.  Personally,  however,  I  never  had 
anything  to  do  with  these  side-issues;  my  work 
was  independent,  self-supported  and  self-con- 
tained, and  it  continued  to  evolve  in  freedom  on 
its  own  lines  in  the  community.  It  was  not  at- 
tached to  any  school  or  religious  organization, 
although  all  of  its  members  and  teachers  were 
professors  of  one  thing  or  other,  not  excepting 
religion.  Somehow  the  new  energy  kept  rising 
and    pushing    its    own    way,    I    never   started    it 


258    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

or  even  directed  it  after  starting,  as  far  as  I  am 
aware.  It  found  me  at  hand  and  eager,  undoubt- 
edly, but  I  found  it  too,  just  ready  to  be  turned 
loose  into  the  classical  garden  of  beautiful  Ely- 
sium. Thus,  if  we  dare  think  Homerically,  the 
God  within  and  the  God  without  flew  together  and 
kissed  in  a  kind  of  rapture. 

"What  had  our  earlier  philosophic  set  to  do  with 
this  fresh  turn  of  its  history?  It  had  changed  or 
rather  developed  a  good  stretch  out  of  and  beyond 
itself.  Brockmeyer,  our  President,  took  no  part 
in  this  phasis  of  the  work;  in  fact  he  was  mostly 
absent  during  all  these  epochal  years,  having  taken 
flight  from  the  City  and  State  to  the  Indians,  and 
quit  even  philosophy  for  a  time —  a  deeply  dis- 
illusioned Missouri  politician.  Once  he  dragged 
me  with  him  down  to  the  Indian  Teritory  from  my 
Homer  classes,  to  help  him  start  some  sort  of  kin- 
dergarten for  red  children.  I  was  thrown  with 
him  several  days,  and  he  drew  my  sympathy  more 
than  poor  untutored  Loo,  for  in  living,  hapless 
reality  I  saw  before  me  the  hero  Achilles,  wrath- 
ful, estranged  from  his  people,  and  sulking  in  his 
tent  unheroized.  Without  intending  it,  he  gave  me 
a  memorable  lesson  in  the  eternal  Homer. 

Harris  also  had  abandoned  the  then  discordant 
and  disenchanted  St.  Louis  (in  1880)  and  had 
betaken  himself  to  aged  Concord  in  his  dear 
Yankeeland.  He  was  another  instance  of  great 
Departures  of  the  Great  from  the  city  about 
this  time.     Still  he  came  back  every  winter  and 


THE  ST.   LOUIS  LITERARY  CLASSES.         259 

held  classes  and  lectures  on  an  admirable  variety 
of  clashing  topics,  some  of  which  were  Philosophy, 
the  Madonnas,  Holy  Pictures  set  off  with  a  stere- 
optieon,  old-Norse  Sagas,  the  Christian  Trinity, 
including  talks  on  Dante  and  Goethe's  Faust,  espe- 
cially the  Second  Part  of  the  latter,  and  most 
especially  the  Church  Patres  of  the  last  Act.  He 
had  his  devoted  band  of  followers  who  still  upheld 
his  cultural  headship,  though  he  was  no  longer  a 
resident.  As  usual  his  personality  was  more  win- 
ning than  his  word,  which  was  too  often  obscure, 
rambling,  and  I  have  to  think,  indigested.  In  fact, 
Harris  would  not,  perhaps  could  not  easily,  organ- 
ize his  subject.  Still  he  deserved  the  spiritual 
hegemony  which  he  had  won  by  long,  able,  and 
disinterested  service. 

Thus  the  St.  Louis  Movement  was  throbbing  with 
fresh  energy  during  the  present  salient  turn  in 
its  career.  While  Harris  was  inclined  to  scatter 
his  efforts,  I  went  the  other  way,  and  concentrated 
chiefly  upon  the  one  theme  of  Greek  spirit  in  Lit- 
erature, though  I  too  had  some  lateral  branches. 
But  the  prodigy  of  the  fact  which  crossed  me  then 
and  still  haunts  me  is  that  so  many  good  people 
of  St.  Louis,  perhaps  nearly  a  thousand  from  first 
to  last,  should  be  suddenly  seized  with  that  classi- 
cal spell,  almost  a  convulsive  fit  of  old  Greek 
Heathendom,  against  which  as  a  deadly  contagion 
one  worthy  minister  I  heard  of  proposed  a  general 
church  quarantine. 

Never  since  then  has  any  such  fever  of  learning 
scourged  our  naturally  reposeful  population.    And 


260    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT—PART  SECOND. 

never  before  was  it  known,  as  far  as  I  have  been 
able  to  dig  in  our  dust-wooing  ereole  archives.  The 
quiescent  volcano  erupted  the  one  time,  and  soon 
thereafter  went  to  sleep  again  in  a  long,  long  nap, 
but  I  hope  not  eternal.  Why  just  then  for  once 
and  for  all?  What  possible  cause?  Did  some 
super-eminent  Power,  like  the  World-Spirit,  prod 
us  afresh  for  its  end?  Hard  to  see  any  such  high 
intervention  in  the  present  case.  Or  was  it  a  bot- 
tomless popular  caprice,  an  unfathomable  sudden 
fad  of  the  folk-soul?  I  have  tried  to  connect  it 
with  the  city's  prevailing  mood  of  those  years, 
which  was  that  of  the  Great  Disillusion  through 
the  census  of  1880.  Or  could  I  have  been  the  one 
wee  microbe  which  spread  that  Greek  contagion 
through  the  whole  community?  I  think  I  may 
have  been  the  main  center  round  which  it  chiefly 
gathered  and  hovered  for  a  season;  but  then  I 
have  never  been  able  to  start  any  such  epidemic 
since,  though  I  have  tried  hard  more  than  once 
to  give  a  fresh  inoculation.  I  may  tell  of  me,  how- 
ever, that  I  was  then  at  the  highest  creative  up- 
burst  of  what  I  may  call  my  Greek  productivity  in 
verse  and  prose.  Under  such  a  spell  it  is  possible 
that  I  may  have  been  somewhat  more  contagious 
than  usual  in  imparting  my  Greek  enthusiasm. 

But  the  individual  impulse  to  recreate  in  fresh 
forms  of  my  own  speech  that  subtle  classical  spirit 
had  likewise  its  climacteric  from  which  it  went  into 
decline.  The  red  flush  of  my  first  Greek  enchant- 
ment began   to  pale,   and   to  move   into   another 


THE  ST.  LOUIS  LITERARY  CLASSES.        261 

epoch.    But  for  this  transition  the  present  narra- 
tive is  not  yet  ripe. 

A  more  subtle  result  of  these  classes  had  started 
to  outline  itself  in  my  mind:  the  new  educative 
institution  of  the  whole  community,  which  lies 
beyond  all  the  academic  forms  of  instruction — 
High  School,  College,  University.  I  did  not  per- 
ceive at  the  time  the  full  bearing  of  this  phase  of 
our  St.  Louis  Movement.  But  really  we  had  broken 
ground  for  the  coming  home-grown  University, 
quite  different  from  the  traditional  one  imported 
from  Europe.  I  gave  it  then  no  name,  because  I 
was  hardly  conscious  of  its  existence ;  in  fact,  the 
germ  had  still  to  unfold  and  to  show  itself  per- 
manent. As  far  as  I  then  could  tell,  it  might 
be  merely  a  temporary  bubble  of  the  time's  caprice, 
refulgent  as  the  spectrum  to-day,  exploded  to  zero 
on  the  morrow.  Still  it  put  an  enduring  stamp 
upon  my  form  of  instruction,  indeed  it  sealed  my 
life  to  its  propagation.  I  never  since  that  experi- 
ence with  communal  classes  and  their  native  spirit, 
was  able  to  be  a  member  of  any  academic  institu- 
tion in  spite  of  some  fair  opportunities.  I  have 
not  been  hostile ;  I  have  co-operated  dozen  of  times 
with  the  scholastic  tradition;  but  I  have  refused 
to  be  subject  to  it,  or  to  submerge  in  it  my  own 
educative  organism,  small  and  incomplete  though 
this  be.  Thus  I  have  evolved  along  with  my 
instruction  my  own  instrumentalities  of  imparta- 
tion,  which,  hardly  more  than  embryonic  at  pres- 
ent, have,  I  believe,  a  distinctive  future.     At  a 


262    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

later  period  when  I  had  become  more  fully  aware 
of  this  secretly  growing  institute  of  universal  cul- 
ture, I  named  it  the  Communal  University. 

So  much  for  the  St.  Louis  Movement  in  its  new 
stage  on  its  own  native  soil.  But  we  are  to  witness 
it  making  a  migration  out  of  the  West  to  the  East, 
out  of  a  young  free-born  State  to  an  old  colonial 
State  full  of  manifold  tradition,  which  it  has  to 
meet  with  fresh  energy. 

Ill 

The  Concord  Philosophical  School 

Another  step  it  was  in  the  Great  Departure  of 
the  time,  when  the  St.  Louis  Movement  itself  de- 
parted or  began  to  depart  from  St.  Louis,  its  orig- 
inal home,  and  to  settle  elsewhere  in  a  sort  of 
spiritual  estrangement.  Our  philosophic  President 
Brockmeyer  had  departed  from  us  into  a  voluntary 
exile  among  the  unphilosophie  savages;  but  he 
cannot  be  forgotten  by  this  history — he  the  massive 
but  increate  and  uncreative  potentiality  underly- 
ing the  entire  St.  Louis  Movement.  Our  Secretary 
Harris,  the  tireless  propagandist,  had  departed 
from  us  in  the  other  direction,  toward  the  highly 
tutored  New  Englanders,  whom  he  would  still 
further  tutor  and  inoculate  with  the  philosophic 
world-view  of  Hegel.  Here  we  may  be  allowed  to 
mention  the  third  man  of  the  original  triad,  none 
other  than  private  Snider  who  was  still  holding 
the  fort  at  St.  Louis  with  the  loyal  assistance  of 


THE  CONCORD  PHILOSOPHICAL  SCHOOL.        263 

other  privates.  But  he  too  was  getting  ready  to 
straddle,  that  is,  both  to  stay  and  to  depart,  seek- 
ing if  possible,  to  unite  the  two  sides  in  some  new 
reconciling  combination.  Each  of  these  three 
diverse  actions  doubtless  sprang  from  the  deepest 
instinct  of  their  respective  doers,  and  mirrored 
their  individual  characters,  re-acting  on  the  com- 
mon cause,  which  we  still  shall  name  the  St.  Louis 
Movement. 

Taking  up  now  this  third  person  and  making 
him  the  first,  at  least  grammatically,  I  may  an- 
nounce concerning  myself,  with  modesty  I  hope, 
that  I  received  not  long  after  my  return  to  St. 
Louis  an  invitation  to  give  a  course  of  lectures  on 
Shakespeare  at  the  Concord  School  of  Philosophy 
during  the  summer  session  of  1880.  To  me,  the 
St.  Louis  schoolmaster,  with  small  ability  for  self- 
pushing  and  seemingly  smaller  for  any  public 
function,  this  seemed  a  surprising  advancement. 
Moreover  it  has  remained  an  influential  turn  in 
my  life.  How  did  it  come  about?  And  what  is 
this  new  School  of  Philosophy  which  has  risen  to 
light  during  my  absence  overseas  on  my  European 
Journey  ? 

I  think  it  was  in  September,  1879,  as  I  was 
sauntering  around  Lafayette  Park,  rather  listless 
and  Uncertain  of  the  future,  that  I  saw  Harris, 
recognizing  me,  leap  out  of  his  buggy  and  approach 
me  with  a  hearty  smile  and  salute,  which  I  warmly 
requited,  as  I  had  not  seen  him  since  I  had  come 
back  from  abroad,  for  he  had  been  out  of  town. 


264    THE  ST.  LOUIS  ^MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

He  told  me  that  he  had  been  giving  some  lectures 
at  Concord,  Massachusetts,  during  the  summer, 
that  a  School  of  Philosophy  had  been  established 
there  to  be  held  every  summer,  and  that  I  had 
been  appointed  one  of  the  lecturers.  He  further- 
more informed  me  that  he  had  just  given  his  first 
course  at  the  Orchard  House,  the  old  well-laureled 
mansion  of  Mr.  A.  Bronson  Alcott  and  daughters, 
that  the  attendance,  beyond  all  expectation,  had 
overflowed  parlor  and  hall  and  even  windows,  and 
that  next  year  the  School  was  to  have  a  new  com- 
modious building,  known  as  the  Hillside  Chapel, 
the  generous  gift  of  a  New  York  lady  philan- 
thropist, Mrs.  Elizabeth  Thompson. 

It  was  evident  that  Harris  felt  very  buoyant  in 
his  new  elevation  (so  he  held  it),  and  he  radiated 
over  me  and  into  me  his  glowing  prospects.  He 
said  he  had  calculated  upon  my  help,  and  at  once 
asked  what  theme  I  would  like  to  take  on  the 
program :  philosophic  or  literary,  Hegel  or  Shakes- 
peare? I  answered  that  I  was  not  in  the  mood  for 
philosophy,  not  even  for  Hegel,  and  that  he  was 
well  able  to  cover  the  field  himself,  but  that  I 
would  come  to  his  aid  in  the  discussions,  whenever 
I  could  serve  him.  "Very  well,"  he  replied,  "I 
shall  put  you  down  for  Shakespeare;  your  book 
has  made  you  known ;  you  are  recognized  as" — and 
so  forth  and  so  forth — all  of  which  had  better  here 
be  expurgated.  Finally  looking  around  to  see  if 
anybody  were  near,  and  then  bowing  his  face  close 
to  mine  he  spoke  in  a  whisper:  "When  this  scho- 


THE  CONCORD  PHILOSOPHICAL  SCHOOL.       265 

lastic  year  is  up,  I  intend  to  resign  as  Superinten- 
tendent  of  the  St.  Louis  Public  Schools,  and  move 
permanently  to  Concord,  where  I  shall  occupy  with 
my  family  the  Orchard  House  of  Mr.  Alcott,  who 
is  going  to  live  down  town  in  the  old  Thoreau 
residence.  Just  across  the  street  from  me,  you 
know  is  the  home  of  Emerson."  It  was  evident 
that  Harris  smiled  much  elated  over  his  establish- 
ment among  the  eminent  Concord  Worthies,  whose 
coming  successor  he  might  with  some  self-appre- 
ciation regard  himself.  Fleeting  traces  of  this  am- 
bition I  had  long  forefelt  in  him  at  St.  Louis. 

Still  my  surprise  hit  me  hard,  indeed  I  became 
quite  speechless  at  this  strange  new  throw  of  fate 's 
dice-box.  Meanwhile  he  had  turned  away,  and 
with  the  parting  words,  "Enough  for  this  time, 
come  to  see  me  as  soon  as  you  can,"  he  leaped  into 
his  buggy  nodding  to  me  a  flash  of  felicity  as  he 
whisked  around  a  corner.  He  left  me  quizzing: 
Well  what  does  this  sudden  fresh  intervention  of 
the  Powers  mean  again?  For  it  was  evident  that 
here  had  arrived  some  decisive  crisis  or  node  in 
the  St.  Louis  Movement,  of  which  Harris  had  been 
hitherto  the  most  efficient  and  the  most  dis- 
tinguished propagandist.  And  he  was  going  to 
quit  his  own  well-tilled  field,  abandon  the  world 
he  had  built  during  his  whole  youthful  two  dec- 
ades of  years  in  St.  Louis.  He  touched  now  forty- 
four,  and  had  poured  forth  an  enormous  energy 
in  a  number  of  directions.  But  is  his  creative 
power  still  at  high  flood? 


266    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

I  paced  the  Park  in  slow  deliberation  about  what 
I  should  do  with  myself  in  the  emergency.  It 
seemed  indeed  a  new  allotment,  but  also  a  new 
opportunity,  and  the  trend  of  it  looked  toward  the 
scattering  of  the  St.  Louis  group  and  of  their 
Movement.  The  oracle  appeared  foretelling  to  us 
our  dispersion,  or,  to  employ  the  capital  term 
already  used,  our  Departure.  My  trip  abroad  lay 
ensconced  in  the  same  general  plan.  This  Concord 
project  signified  at  least  a  separation  into  two 
lines,  possibly  a  transfer  from  West  to  East.  Did 
Harris,  who  had  in  him  ever  the  lurking  Yankee, 
intend  such  removal  ?  I  did  not  fail  to  notice  that 
the  glow  of  his  talk  with  me  illumined  especially 
the  famous  men  of  Concord  headed  by  Emerson, 
to  whom  he  was  now  to  be  the  next  neighbor. 

Harris  had  at  this  time  the  outlook  upon  a  mod- 
est but  sufficient  competence  for  the  future,  as  I 
understood  from  several  of  his  allusions.  He  had 
saved  something  from  his  salary,  he  received  fair 
royalties  from  his  publishers,  his  articles  and  lec- 
tures produced  quite  a  little  income — once  and 
only  once,  as  far  as  I  know,  he  took  home  to  Con- 
cord from  a  six  weeks'  course  of  lectures  in  St. 
Louis  some  fifteen  hundred  dollars — which  he 
thought  pretty  good,  and  so  did  I  even  more  em- 
phatically, for  it  summed  up  considerably  above 
all  that  I  could  scrape  together  in  a  year  through 
my  class-work.  Moreover  his  living  expenses 
needed  not  to  be  so  very  high  in  a  New  England 
country-town.    Thus  Harris  was  going  to  Concord 


THE  CONCORD  PHILOSOPHICAL  SCHOOL.       267 

in  company  with  that  first  and  best  freedom,  con- 
dition of  all  other  kinds  of  freedom,  namely  eco- 
nomic freedom.  If  he  chose,  he  was  now  in  a  con- 
dition to  write  unremunerative  books  and  to  do 
free  labor  in  honor  of  his  dearest  Philosophy,  and 
for  the  sake  of  his  love  alone  to  defy  the  three 
primordial  fates  of  human  existence — food,  rai- 
ment, and  shelter.  In  other  words  he  could  now 
give  himself  up  wholly  to  his  Super-vocation,  to 
which  indeed  he  had  already  shown  himself  con- 
secrated at  St.  Louis. 

In  this  seemingly  sudden  and  cardinal  change, 
which  included  vocation,  career,  and  locality,  Har- 
ris had  his  unspoken  motive  deeper  than  the 
spoken.  I  had  noticed  that  underneath  all  his 
enthusiasm  for  the  West  lay  in  the  bottom  of  his 
heart  an  exile's  longing  for  his  native  New  Eng- 
land. Now  there  has  come  the  opportunity  in  his 
homeland  for  a  new  succession  in  philosophy  after 
Transcendentalism,  whose  very  fortress  he  wished 
to  capture  and  reconstruct.  Emerson,  though 
still  alive,  was  mentally  gone;  Alcott  had  turned 
eighty,  and  was  creatively  closed  out,  but  he  could 
yet  be  active  enough  to  form  an  excellent  bridge 
from  the  old  into  the  present.  But  he,  not  very 
long  after  the  School  had  well  begun,  went  to 
pieces,  still  living.  And  Sanborn,  the  unparalleled 
man  of  publicity  and  doubtless  the  School's  chief 
practical  organizer,  was  even  eager  to  start  a  new 
order  for  a  number  of  reasons,  some  of  them  with 
me  conjectural.    In  his  cwvn  town  I  once  heard  him 


268    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

berated  as  the  Yankee  renegade  for  his  part  in 
foisting  the  Western  set  of  philosophers  upon 
Emerson's  Concord.  And  I  had  kept  wondering 
in  St.  Louis  why  Harris  should  so  often  bring  to 
us  the  aged  Alcott  to  say  over  again  and  again 
what  the  repeating  sayer  of  the  said  had  already 
better  said,  and  why  he  should  be  so  assiduous  in 
admiration  of  what,  he  had  often  already  suffi- 
ciently admired.  He  was  preparing  the  time  and 
manner  of  his  great  Departure  from  the  St.  Louis 
Public  Schools  to  a  new  career  purely  philosoph- 
ical. In  1879  he  went  to  Concord  and  made  his 
opening  trial ;  he  found  the  transition  begging  him 
to  seize  it  at  the  right  psychologic  moment.  I 
saw  him  while  still  in  the  furnace  white-heat  of 
his  first  resolution.  Certainly  a  justifiable  goal 
for  him  or  any  man;  but  will  he  be  able  to  do  the 
deed  against  all  the  learned  jealousies  of  Har- 
vard and  the  other  Academics  elsewhere  in  New 
England?  It  was  Emerson's^ old  fight  to  be  fought 
over  again  without  his  chances.  So  the  question 
has  often  come  up  to  me,  Was  it  the  part  of  wis- 
dom in  Harris  to  make  this  change,  and  never  to 
unmake  it  afterward  when  he  had  found  out? 

He  probably  proposed  to  hitch  the  two  horses, 
Concord  and  St.  Louis,  to  his  philosophic  chariot, 
and  to  keep  them  in  the  race  from  his  Eastern 
home.  This  he  succeeded  in  doing  for  a  time. 
Then  he  had  here  able  and  devoted  lieutenants, 
especially  one  cleverest  woman,  who  would  obey 
him  to  the  letter.     For  when  Harris  quit  us,  he 


THE  CONCORD  PHILOSOPHICAL  SCHOOL.       269 

easily  held  the  cultural  primacy  of  St.  Louis,  and 
he  knew  it.  He  dominated  more  than  any  other 
man  or  institution  the  intellectual  character  of  our 
city.  Undoubtedly  he  had  opposition,  and  at  times 
much  worry  even  in  his  official  administration. 
Still  his  influence  was  central,  and  radiated 
through  the  whole  community. 

As  for  me,  my  attitude  was  that  of  independent 
co-operation.  I  followed  a  somewhat  different  line, 
but  in  the  same  St.  Louis  Movement.  I  had  to 
develop  and  then  to  express  myself  in  my  own 
right.  I  may  say  here  that  I  also  harnessed  those 
two  steeds,  St.  Louis  and  Concord,  to  my  little 
wain  not  the  philosophical  but  the  literary,  and  kept 
them  prancing  together  for  several  years.  But  my 
goal  remained  in  the  West,  even  when  I  was  com- 
pelled to  quit  St.  Louis;  I  had  no  Mayflower  tra- 
dition to  chain  me  to  Plymouth  Rock  or  any  other 
piece  of  stone. 

Accordingly,  in  the  summer  of  1880,  I  again 
turned  my  face  Eastward,  sped  across  the  Missis- 
sippi, over  the  Alleghanies,  to  the  ancient  Bay 
State,  and  in  due  time  stepped  off  the  railroad 
train  at  Concord.  It  was  a  new  sensation  to  find 
myself  and  the  St.  Louis  Movement  steaming  across 
the  mountains  and  over  the  rivers  toward  the 
Atlantic  seacoast,  and  entering  an  old  colonial 
Commonwealth,  just  the  most  highly  educated  and 
self-appreciative  in  the  whole  country.  It  was  an 
adventure,  however,  in  which  I  was  not  alone. 

Evening  had  come,  I  had  taken  my  repast,  and 


270    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

was  seated  on  a  little  veranda  at  the  Hotel  Middle- 
sex, gazing  toward 's  Thoreau's  Musketaquid,  and 
listening  still  to  that  famous  Emersonian  shot 
heard  round  the  world  and  also  down  time,  when 
three  men  came  up  to  me  in  the  twilight.  I  soon 
recognized  the  first  of  them  to  be  Harris,  who  in- 
troduced me  to  the  others.  One  of  the  two  was 
Mr.  S.  H.  Emery,  Director  of  the  School,  who,  a 
born  New-Englander  had  early  in  life  come  to  the 
West,  made  his  fortune  in  business  at  Quincy,  111., 
and  especially  had  become  inoculated  with  Hegel 
through  Harris's  Journal  of  Speculative  Philoso- 
phy. He  was  still  in  middle  life,  had  given  up  a 
profitable  partnership,  and  had  settled  at  Concord 
for  the  purpose  of  devoting  himself  to  Philosophy, 
as  I  then  understood  him,  for  the  rest  of  his  days. 
Can  he  hold  out  ?  The  fact,  however,  of  his  doing 
such  a  deed  at  once  gave  him  a  high  standing  in 
my  eyes.  The  second  stranger  was  Mr.  F.  B.  San- 
born, officially  called  the  Secretary,  the  chief  jour- 
nalistic spirit  of  the  enterprise.  He  was  tall  and 
spare,  with  keen-edged  feature  in  the  center  of 
which  would  play  a  little  drama  of  winsome  smiles ; 
I  might  call  them  honeyed  from  the  bee,  for  there 
is  no  doubt  that  his  mellifluous  mouth  concealed 
a  stinger  which  he  know  how  to  flesh  upon  occa- 
sion. In  a  few  days  I  found  that  out  and  somewhat 
more.  Just  now  he  bantered  me  pleasantly  by  fling- 
ing at  me  the  name  of  Elpinike,  the  Greek  maiden 
of  my  Delphic  Days,  which  book  he  had  in  some 
way  unknown  to  me  gotten  hold  of,  and  out  of 


TEE  CONCORD  PEILOSOPEICAL  SCEOOL.       271 

which  he  had  at  least  fished  that  one  word  for 
future  use,  whose  moment  had  now  arrived.  I  want 
to  say  that  just  on  account  of  this  character  I 
took  a  decided  liking  for  Mr.  Sanborn;  we  could 
antagonize,  even  get  a  litle  angry,  and  still  remain 
friends.  His  last  letter  to  me  I  received  only  a 
few  months  before  his  death  during  the  past  year 
(1918),  and  it  remains  to  me  a  precious  heart- 
stirring  token.  Just  now  I  have  taken  his  letter 
out  of  its  corner  and  read  it  anew  as  a  memorial 
of  the  man.  He  was  still,  though  very  old,  on  the 
look-out  to  do  a  service,  as  usual,  without  request. 
Though  we  often  took  a  tilt  at  each  other  in  the 
course  of  the  School's  discussions,  and  once  at  a 
private  house  in  the  town,  with  mutual  satisfac- 
tion of  triumph,  I  think,  I  would  plant  now  upon 
his  new-made  grave  in  Sleepy  Hollow  this  little 
flower  plucked  from  my  own  experience:  Among 
all  the  men  whom  I  have  ever  seen  tested  he  stands 
first  in  his  love  of  secretly  extending  anonymous 
help  to  those  who  might,  in  his  opinion,  have  need 
of  it,  and  who  would  never  let  such  need  be  known. 
The  course  of  my  Shakespeare's  lectures  started 
and  plodded  along  rather  uneventfully,  as  far  as  I 
now  remember,  with  the  usual  amount  of  criticism 
and  of  defence.  I  should  conjecture  fifty  people 
were  the  average  of  attendance;  among  them  was 
Miss  Blow,  whom  I  had  not  seen  before,  but  she 
soon  made  herself  known.  Indeed  there  was  quite 
a  delegation  from  St.  Louis  in  the  audience,  who 
were  especially  friends  of  Harris,   and  in  conse- 


272    THE  BT.LOUI^  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

quence  strong  supporters  of  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment. I  think  Emerson  appeared  once  to  hear  me, 
and  Mr.  Aleott  presided.  Men  of  distinction 
dropped  in  to  see  what  was  going  on,  since  the 
public  press  was  making  a  great  noise  by  extended 
reports,  and  by  comments  serious  and  comic.  One 
day  a  stately  gentleman  having  a  look  of  eminence 
passed  the  door  with  his  lady,  and  took  a  seat 
near  the  front  row;  I  recall  the  crinkles  in  the 
rim  of  his  furled  Panama  hat,  as  he  lifted  it  off 
his  head  and  laid  it  down  beside  him  with  judicial 
dignity.  When  I  had  finished  my  lecture,  in  which 
Hamlet  received  his  tragic  doom,  Emery,  who  sat 
near,  leaned  over  to  me  and  whispered:  That  is 
Judge  Alphonso  Taft,  ex-Attorney-General  of  the 
United  States.  I  had  heard  a  good  deal  some 
years  before  about  Judge  Taft  of  the  Superior 
Court  when  I  lived  at  Cincinnati,  though  I  had 
never  seen  him ;  and  Harris  ("William  Torrey)  told 
me  once,  with  the  only  gleam  of  family  pride  I 
ever  knew  him  to  shoot,  that  he  was  related  to 
Mrs.  Taft  through  the  famous  New  England  Tor- 
reys.  Judge  Taft  now.  twisted  a  little  in  his  seat, 
and  started  to  cross-examine  me  on  the  question 
of  Hamlet's  madness,  as  was  his  right,  when  I 
laid  down  the  law,  at  least  my  law,  in  the  case: 
"Hamlet  is  never  so  mad  as  not  to  be  respon- 
sible; hence  our  poetic  Judge  Shakespeare  con- 
demns him  to  his  tragic  death  at  the  end  of  the 
play;  and  this  Superior  Court  now  sitting  here 
in  the  Concord  School  of  Philosophy  affirms  the 


THE  CONCORD  PHILOSOPHICAL  SCHOOL.       273 

judgment  of  the  poet."  Somehow  thus,  not  pre- 
cisely perhaps,  was  worded  the  rather  legalized 
decision  in  honor  of  the  distinguished  guests.  The 
audience  stared  with  vacant  face-long  gravity,  no- 
body seemed  to  understand  the  nub,  being  deemed 
possibly  some  deep  metaphysical  subtlety,  such  as 
is  expected  of  philosophers.  Only  Mrs.  Taft  turned 
to  her  husband  and  smiled  against  him  (I  think) 
so  exuberantly  that  she  raised  her  fan  to  her  lips 
to  check  or  at  least  to  hide  their  perhaps  too  in- 
formal overflow.  The  Judge  murmured  a  word 
which  I  did  not  then  understand,  but  which  I  dare 
now  conjecture  to  have  been  "overruled."  This 
ended  the  discussion,  when  Harris  ran  down  from 
the  rostrum  in  front  of  me  to  salute  his  illustrious 
kinsfolk. 

But  the  real  episode  of  the  course  took  place  at 
the  last  lecture,  which  I  concluded  to  make  prac- 
tical and  to  apply  directly  to  Concord.  I  had 
found  in  my  studies  an  entire  group  of  Shakes- 
peare's comedies  in  which  there  is  a  flight  from 
civilized  life  to  the  woods  and  to  a  primitive  ex- 
istence, whereof  an  example  is  seen  in  "As  you 
like  it."  Then,  after  due  experience  there  is  a 
return  of  the  fugitive  to  civilization  and  its  insti- 
tutions. Now  the  poet  makes  such  flight  and  return 
the  setting  of  his  comic  action  in  no  less  than  eight 
plays,  according  to  my  count.  Herein  lay  the  point 
of  comparison:  Concord  in  her  famous  individu- 
als had  passed  through  a  very  similar  phase  of 
human  experience,  had  fled  in  protest  from  the 


274    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

existent  social  order,  had  remained  out  for  a  while 
in  the  new  sylvan  or  rural  paradise,  but  had  at 
last  come  back  in  a  sort  of  penitent  disillusion. 
Thus  Concord  had  actually  lived  through  a  great 
human  comedy  of  the  Shakespearian  model,  which 
was  thus  verified  in  the  town's  history.  Alcott  had 
taken  his  flight  to  Brook  Farm,  Thoreau  to  Walden, 
Emerson  longed  to  flee  to  Berkshire  Hills,  even  to 
Canada,  as  we  see  by  his  Journal,  but  he  never 
could  quite  break  loose  from  his  family  and  from 
his  revenues.  These  men  were  the  great  Concord- 
ites  of  the  past  and  representatives  of  their  town 
and  time ;  and  with  them  were  other,  even  if  lesser, 
examples  of  the  same  tendency,  making  a  comic  era 
which  Shakespeare  had  already  observed  more 
than  two  centuries  before,  and  had  put  into  a  dra- 
matic structure. 

The  special  play  of  Flight  and  Return  which  I 
took  up  for  local  application  was  Love's  Labour's 
Lost,  in  which  the  King  and  his  three  Lords  retire 
from  the  world,  and  especially  from  the  presence 
of  woman,  for  the  purpose  of  studying  philosophy, 
making  the  court  "into  a  little  Academe,"  named 
and  patterned  after  the  Athenian  home  of  Plato. 
Herein  lay  a  striking  similarity  to  the  Concord 
School  of  Philosophy,  which  also  had  its  Platonic 
course  of  lectures  with  devoted  followers,  and  had 
even  called  itself  the  modern  Academe.  But  now 
enters  the  trouble;  love,  the  old  enemy  of  con- 
templative philosophy,  appears  in  the  persons  of 
four  ladies  who  storm  the  whole  celibate  Academe 


THE  CONCORD  PHILOSOPHICAL  SCHOOL.       275 

and  carry  off  the  four  philosophers  as  their  cap- 
tives.    Such  was  the  outcome  of  the  Shakespearian 
School  of  Philosophy  as  portrayed  in  the  poet's 
famous  comedy,  a  far-off  foreshow  of  our  present 
School,  and  now  held  up  as  a  kind  of  mirror  before 
Concord.     Three-fourths  or  more  of  the  audience 
were  ladies,  who  smiled   appreciation   if  not   ap- 
proval of  the  solution  of  the  great  master's  dra- 
matic collision  between  Love  and  Philosophy.   And 
it  so  happened  that  this  was  the  main  theme  which 
the  jokesmith  of  newspaper  and  even  of  magazine 
delighted  to  set  forth  in  the  supposed  dialect  of 
the  School,  when  it  discussed  "the  Whatness  of 
the  Howsoever",  or  "the  Thingness  of  the  Why", 
though  I  never  heard  such  talk  there.    One  of  these 
squibs  crossed  me  several  times  in  its  travels  round 
town,  running  thus:    Two  philosophers,  a  young 
lady  and  a  young  gentleman  (both  of  them  not  so 
very  young)    were  promenading    in    the  Walden 
woods,  and  had  become  deeply  entangled  in  a  warm 
philosophic  discussion,  when  the  woman  was  heard 
to  exclaim:  "Pshaw!  you  are  no  philosopher,  else 
you  would  understand  the  Yesness  of  my  No!" 
In  a  shoemaker's  shop  whither  I  had  gone  to  get 
my  foot-gear  cobbled,  and  where  I  heard  the  talk 
told  with  new  variations,  I  was  asked  by  the  artist 
point-blank:    "Were  you  that  philosopher? 

But  the  worst  scrimmage  I  ever  saw  in  the 
School,  with  angry  flashes  and  hot  words,  I  hap- 
pened to  be  the  means  of  bringing  on  quite  unin- 
tentionally at  the  close  of  my  last  lecture.    I  was 


276    THE  ST- LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

talking  about  Thoreau's  flight  to  Walden  hardly 
a  mile  distant  from  his  best  friend's  door  and  from 
the  town  itself,  and  I  rather  -made  light  of  such  a 
minute  separation  from  society.  I  know  that  I 
was  thinking  of,  but  I  did  not  mention,  the  far 
more  spacious  and  defiant  withdrawal  of  Brock- 
meyer  to  a  hunter's  life  in  the  primitive  forests 
of  "Warren  County,  Missouri,  from  which,  however, 
he  also  had  to  come  back  to  civilization  and  earn 
money  for  his  gunpowder  and  some  apparel,  and 
finally  to  win  a  wife.  When  I  had  finished,  San- 
born jumping  up  scowled  at  me  in  a  sort  of  pale 
tremble,  and  declared  that  he  was  there  to  defend 
the  good  name  of  his  friend  Thoreau  who  was  no 
longer  on  this  side  to  defend  himself.  Thereupon 
he  launched  into  a  sharp  damnatory  criticism  of 
my  whole  Shakespearian  course,  and  especially  my 
attempt  to  make  fun  of  his  townspeople.  I  felt 
inclined  merely  to  smile  at  him,  for  in  his  ire  he 
hardly  grazed  the  mark ;  but  I  noticed  that  Harris 
began  to  get  white  about  the  lips,  which  I  knew 
of  old  to  be  his  native  war-paint;  then  he  started 
a  warm  defence  of  my  views,  of  course  without 
their  teaseful  banter.  Sanborn  replied  and  Harris 
retorted.  It  looked  squally  for  a  moment  when 
the  two  chief  promoters  of  the  School  began  to 
knock  their  heads  together  in  hot  disputation. 
Then  the  aged  reverend  form  of  Mr.  Alcott  rose 
from  his  presidential  chair,  and  with  his  calm 
rather  sepulchral  voice  and  words  allayed  the  tem- 
pest, saying  that  he  had  in  his  life  fled  thrice  from 


THE  CONCORD  PHILOSOPHICAL  SCHOOL.       277 

the  established  social  order,  and  had  thrice  re- 
turned, and  that  he  still  thought  himself  young 
enough  to  play  once  more  at  least  the  same  Shakes- 
pearian Comedy  of  flight  and  return  before  he 
passed  over  into  Sleepy  Hollow.  Whereat  we  all 
rippled  into  a  smile  at  the  old  man's  Yankee 
humor  and  philosophic  serenity,  in  spite  of  the 
somewhat  funereal  close  of  his  talk.  The  session 
broke  up  in  a  love-feast ;  still  I  rather  thought  that 
this  last  speech  of  mine  would  be  my  last  at  Con- 
cord. 

Here  I  may  remark  concerning  the  conversa- 
tional frequency  of  Sleepy  Hollow  in  Concord,  that 
this  beautiful  cemetery  seems  to  be  inwoven  into 
the  very  life  and  speech  of  the  citizenry.  I  never 
knew  an  American  town  whose  graveyard  was  such 
a  vital,  intimate  even  artistic  part  of  its  daily 
existence.  Dead  Concord  in  a  way  appears  more 
alive  than  living  Concord.  I  suppose  that  Egypt 
with  its  mummied  cities  must  have  been  somewhat 
similar,  and  perhaps  China  is,  with  its  worship  of 
ancestors.  At  times  there  came  over  me  in  cer- 
tain places  of  Concord  the  uncanny  feeling  with 
which  I  wandered  through  the  old  Etruscan  tombs 
of  Italy — all  that  is  at  present  left  of  a  great 
people,  of  its  glory  and  its  civilization.  Concord's 
own  folks  are  now  saying,  as  I  have  been  told,  in 
grim  self-criticism,  that  Sleepy  Hollow  has  become 
their  chief  civic  asset. 


278    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

IV 

After  School 

This  first  course  of  mine  ended  with  the  second 
year  of  the  Concord  School  which  was  now  deemed 
a  success,  and  perhaps  a  permanent  institute  of 
Philosophy  in  America,  to  be  supplemented  with 
special  application  to  various  fields  of  knowledge. 
Another  year  was  enthusiastically  agreed  upon, 
and  some  forecasts  were  given  concerning  its  top- 
ics. As  for  me,  I  had  enjoyed  the  School's  people, 
who  on  the  whole  formed  quite  a  little  museum  of 
characters  from  all  parts  of  the  country,  espe- 
cially from  New  England,  though  the  St.  Louis 
contingent  seemed  the  largest,  or  at  least  the  most 
pronounced  group  in  the  audience,  with  Miss  Blow 
at  its  center.  In  one  respect  I  had  found  myself 
out:  I  must  go  back  to  St.  Louis,  at  least  for  the 
present. 

A  day  or  two  after  the  close  of  the  School,  I 
went  over  to  the  Orchard  House  to  see  how  Harris 
felt  in  his  new  situation,  for  the  shock  of  the 
change  to  a  new  vocation  and  to  a  new  life  must 
have  been  somewhat  volcanic.  But  I  found  him 
stretched  out  at  ease  on  his  sofa,  to  which  was  at- 
tached an  apparatus,  partly  of  his  own  contriv- 
ance, I  believe,  whereby  he  could  not  only  read  but 
also  write  while  lying  down.  He  took  pride  in 
showing  me  the  great  convenience  of  the  thing, 
especially  as  he  had  a  shifty  knack  at  mechanical 
tinkering  amid  all  his  philosophy.     He  advised  me 


AFTER  SCHOOL.  279 

to  help  myself  to  ease  in  a  similar  way  when  I 
took  pen  in  hand;  but  I  had  to  say:  "Not  for  me; 
when  I  write,  I  cannot  even  sit  down  long,  I  have 
to  stand  up  and  draw  tense  every  nerve  of  my 
body  in  response  to  the  exertion  of  my  brain; 
otherwise  what  I  scribble  is  utterly  flabby.  My 
act  of  writing  is  a  self-wrestling,  perchance  a 
wrestle  with  the  God  unwilling,  in  which  at  most 
I  can  hold  out  but  a  couple  of  hours  or  so  at  a  time. 
As  you  have  started  to  attend  church  here  in  Con- 
cord, which  you  did  not  in  St.  Louis,  let  me  give 
you  a  single  article  of  my  creed:  to  write  is  my 
prayer.  I  have  changed  the  old  Saint's  Latin 
maxim  Laborare  est  orare  to  this  briefest  breviary, 
Scribere  est  orare." 

Harris  listened  to  my  homily  with  added  lan- 
guor, as  he  was  then  letting  himself  loose  from  his 
six  weeks'  strain  of  lecturing  and  other  anxieties 
connected  with  the  School.  He  looked  reminiscent 
also,  though  he  said  nothing  of  the  past.  Soon, 
however,  he  picked  up  the  future:  "When  I  get 
a  little  rested  I  am  going  to  finish  my  book  on 
Hegel's  Logic,  which  I  have  planned  these  many 
years,  but  I  had  not  the  time  to  write  it  out  at 
St.  Louis.  In  order  to  compel  myself  to  the  task, 
I  have  already  promised  it  to  a  Chicago  publisher. 
This  winter  I  shall  have  leisure."  Thus  Harris 
at  Concord  was  thinking  of  Hegel  more  intently 
than  ever.  He  said  he  purposed  to  make  "that 
German  philosopher  Hegel  talk  English."  I  said 
nothing  but  felt  the  difference  between  his  present 


280    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

aim  and  mine..  Still  I  could  not  help  wondering 
at  that  "Book  of  Fate,"  in  which  he  had  become 
so  deeply  entangled.  Can  he  extricate  himself  by 
writing?  Here,  however,  we  are  able  to  foresay: 
Not  one  but  ten  years  will  glide  away  before  he 
can  ban  that  ever-threatening  Tantalian  Book  into 

print.    And  even  then 

But  soon  he  started  to  talk  of  next  year's  School 
which  was  likewise  on  his  mind,  and  was  not  wholly 
absent  from  mine,  though  I  did  not  then  know 
whether  I  would  be  invited  again ;  I  rather  thought 
not,  after  the  Thoreau  episode  with  Sanborn. 
Nevertheless  I  had  already  made  my  plan.  Harris 
hinted  that  he  would  like  me  to  give  a  course  on 
Hegel's  Aesthetic,  or  better  still,  upon  Hegel's 
Science  of  Law  and  the  State,  saying  in  his  per- 
suasive tone  of  appreciation :  "I  know  you  have 
especially  studied  those  two  subjects,  have  written 
and  lectured  upon  them,  and  moreover  have 
spouted  (his  word)  them  all  around  town  in  years 
past,  so  that  you  can  easily  put  your  stuff  to- 
gether." I  answered:  "No,  I  cannot  do  that;  I 
am  at  present  outside  of  Hegel  and  all  his  works, 
and  have  been  ever  since  my  European  Journey. 
I  live  now  in  the  Greek  world,  and  I  forecast  I  can 
live  nowhere  else  for  some  time  to  come,  till  I  live 
it  out,  teach  it  out,  and  write  it  out  of  myself. 
Besides  I  have  resolved  to  undertake  no  written 
work  in  which  my  whole  Self  is  not  present ;  I  can 
help  you  discuss  at  the  School  of  Philosophy,  but 
I  cannot  produce  on  those  old  lines.     I  may  get 


AFTER  SCHOOL.  281 

back  to  Hegel  again  with  the  years,  but  not  till 
I  have  compassed  my  mind's  most  pressing  charge. 
And  let  me  add,  I  am  done  with  Shakespeare  for 
the  present,  though  I  may  return  to  him  likewise 
after  I  have  evolved  some  more."  So  I  spoke  in 
a  sort  of  prophetic  banter,  for  evolution  was  rioting 
in  the  air  and  in  me  personally  at  that  time,  which 
had  become  decidedly  Darwinian. 

Harris  shot  at  me  through  his  spectacles  with 
his  one  eye,  for  he  had  but  one,  and  exclaimed: 
"Indeed!"  Then  he  seemed  to  turn  inwardly  and 
to  talk  with  himself  for  about  two  minutes,  as  was 
his  frequent  habit.  The  fact  is  he  had  never  taken 
full  measure  of  the  mental  change  wrought  in  me 
by  my  trip  abroad.  But  soon  he  was  ready  with 
a  smiling  answer.  "Very  well;  I  shall  suggest  to 
our  Committee  that  you  be  invited  to  talk  en 
Greece  next  time."  "Ye  Gods,"  I  shouted, 
"that  theme  intoxicates  me  already;  of  course  I 
shall  come  back  with  all  the  Olympian  effluences 
I  can  command;  I  am  going  to  court  the  Muse  the 
whole  year  for  her  inspiration."  To  speak  un- 
mythically,  I  was  just  then  starting  to  write  a 
book  (my  Walk  in  Hellas)  on  the  subject,  and  I 
forethought  I  could  test  my  salient  chapters  on 
that  Concord  audience  of  philosophers. 

Then  I  ventured  to  put  to  Harris  a  question 
which  I  had  often  thought  of  asking  him  before, 
but  hardly  dared:  "The  person  who  knows  more 
about  the  State  and  political  philosophy,  than  any 


282    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

other  man  within  my  purview  is  none  other  than 
your  nearest  friend,  our  President  of  the  old  Philo- 
sophical Society,  Governor  Brockmeyer.  Both  prac- 
tical and  theoretical  knowledge  he  unites;  he  has 
personal  experience  along  with  speculative  study. 
He  is  famed  as  the  father  of  the  present  Constitu- 
tion of  Missouri.  "Why  not  call  him?"  Harris 
leaped  up  from  his  lounge  and  paced  the  floor:  "It 
cannot  be  done,  it  cannot  be  done!  Yet  he  is  the 
genius  of  us  all,  and  that  is  the  fatality  of  our  cause ; 
he  would  be  sure  to  spill  over  into  some  diablery,  or 
even  profanity,  which  would  shock  all  New  Eng- 
land. How  the  newspapers  would  gloat  over  such 
a  morsel  of  Concord  Philosophy!  As  it  is,  they 
find  enough  for  caricature.  I  have  told  you  what 
I  once  heard  him  in  company  say  in  reply  to  Miss 
Brackett — O  No. ' '  I  could  only  mumble :  "I  sup- 
pose I  shall  have  to  agree  with  you ;  I  would  simply 
call  our  old  common  friend  back  to  memory  even 
here  in  the  land  of  the  Puritans,  to  which  that  first 
little  seed-plume  of  his  has  been  wafted.  Anyhow 
he  has  fled  far  off  the  other  way,  westward  to  the 
copper-colored  world  down  in  the  Indian  Terri- 
tory. ' '  I  started  for  the  door  breathing  an  under- 
toned  laugh:  "Yes,  Concord  has  enough  of  the 
Wild  West  in  me  if  not  too  much,  not  to  speak  of 
Brockmeyer."  Harris  shook  my  hand:  "Indeed 
you  have  made  us  remark  you — bring  with  you  next 
time  your  serene  Greeks  balancing  on  their  golden 
mean,  and  possibly  we  shall  be  able  to  keep  you." 
One  of  those  summer  evenings  I  received  an  in- 


AFTER  SCHOOL.  283 

vitation  from  Mrs.  Lathrop  (Rose  Hawthorne)  to 
take  a  cup  of  tea  under  the  trees  of  the  old  Haw- 
thorne mansion,  which  she  with  her  husband 
(George  Parsons  Lathrop)  was  then  occupying  for 
the  season.  Mementos  of  the  famous  novelist  were 
all  around  us,  and  anecdotes  of  the  man  and  the 
locality  made  the  clock  tick  very  rapidly.  Mrs. 
Elizabeth  Thompson  of  New  York,  wealthy,  philan- 
thropic, embarrassed  of  riches,  was  sitting  near  me 
at  the  table,  and  asked  me  now  and  then  a  ques- 
tion about  St.  Louis  which  had  the  strange  gift  of 
of  producing  such  a  multitude  of  philosophers,  not 
only  men  but  women,  for  both  sorts  were  in  ample 
evidence  at  Hillside  Chapel.  She  had  shown  her 
interest  in  the  Concord  School  not  only  by  erect- 
ing the  new  building  but  by  a  still  more  heroic 
test:  she  had  attended  those  abstruse  lectures  on 
philosophy,  two  a-day  for  six  weeks.  Rumor  had 
it  that  she  purposed  some  permanent  endowment. 
At  last  she  plumped  out  the  question:  "Why  do 
you  not  come  East  and  stay  with  your  friend  Har- 
ris and  others?"  The  surface  answer  was  ready: 
"I  am  not  yet  philosopher  enough  to  live  without 
bread."  "That  can  be  supplied  in  the  East,  too," 
was  her  reply.  "Doubtless."  I  dropped,  and  with 
it  dropped  the  plan,  if  there  was  any,  and  I 
dreamed  that  there  was  at  the  time.  But  she 
never  gave  again  to  the  School,  never  appeared 
there  again  in  the  years  afterward,  as  far  as  I 
ever  saw  or  heard.  One  of  her  last  remarks  to  me 
was :  "Oh  I  have  done  so  much  harm  with  gifts  of 


284    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

my  money."  I  did  not  tell  her  that  she  must  be 
very  careful  never  to  harm  me  in  that  way,  and 
she  never  did. 

On  a  sunny  afternoon  of  leisure,  the  day  before 
I  intended  to  leave  for  St.  Louis,  Emery,  Director 
of  the  School,  came  to  the  Hotel  and  asked  me 
to  take  a  final  stroll  with  him  down  the  Lexington 
road.  We  happened  to  meet  Mr.  Emerson  on  the 
way,  and  we  spoke  with  him  a  moment  about  the 
School,  but  he  could  not  recall  a  single  proper 
name,  even  that  of  Mr.  Alcott  he  stumbled  over, 
till  Emery  helped  him  out.  At  some  question,  he 
exclaimed:  "My  reading  has  all  gone  from  me," 
and  he  started  on.  I  quizzed  Emery:  "Tell  me 
now,  is  your  School  to  be  Emerson's  successor, 
with  Harris  and  Hegel  at  the  head?"  My  com- 
panion merely  gave  a  little  tee-hee  for  an  answer 
and  branched  off  to  another  topic,  saying:  "You 
had  better  make  up  your  mind  to  follow  your 
friends  and  come  here  to  live."  We  passed  a 
dwelling  near  the  road,  when  he  stopped  and 
pointed :  ' '  See  there !  you  can  buy  that  farm  house 
for  less  than  it  cost,  with  the  land  thrown  in.  You 
see  it  does  not  pay  to  cultivate  this  meagre  soil 
in  competition  with  the  rich  "Western  prairie.  I 
know  you  have  to  earn  your  way;  but  you  can 
gain  enough  by  your  pen  and  by  giving  lessons 
for  your  simple  needs.  We  are  going  to  have  a 
great  revival  of  philosophy  here,  you  ought  not  to 
be  absent.  Look!  standing  at  yonder  window  of 
yours  you  could  see  in  a  single  sweep  of  the  eye 


AFTER  SCHOOL.  285 

the  houses  of  Emerson,  of  Harris  (once  Alcott's) 
and  of  Hawthorne." 

I  gave  him  my  answer,  for  the  problem  was  not 
new :  ' '  My  dear  friend,  you  have  not  yet  found 
me  quite,  and  here  I  may  give  you  a  little  lesson 
on  me  as  subject.  My  field  is  now  in  the  "West, 
and  my  present  passion  is  not  philosophy,  which 
no  longer  satisfies  me,  though  I  may  have  nothing 
as  yet  to  take  its  place.  I  could  not  endure  to 
impart  instruction  for  money  merely  and  not  for 
myself,  that  is,  for  my  ever-evolving  selfhood.  And 
what  is  more  crushing  than  the  life  of  a  scribbler 
for  magazines  and  newspapers  ?  I  tell  you,  I  have 
to  write  not  for  my  living  but  for  my  salvation. 
Then  I  have  found  the  town  here  not  altogether 
friendly  to  new-comers,  being  very  well  satisfied 
with  itself  and  its  two  centuries  of  ancestry;  at 
you  philosophers  it  secretly  turns  up  its  nose,  as 
I  have  repeatedly  glimpsed ;  even  the  two  of  you 
(Sanborn  and  Alcott)  who  have  long  dwelt  on  this 
spot,  are  not  besung  heroical  by  Concord  in  my 
hearing.  I  ponder  what  is  going  to  become  of  the 
fresh  arrivals,  Harris  and  yourself,  for  you  both 
have  invested  mind  and  money  here.  But  tell  me, 
ye  avenging  Powers,  what  would  be  my  fate  on 
this  spot?" 

I  intended  to  heat  Emery  to  a  hot  shot  with 
these  warm  words,  still  he  kept  cool  in  his  answer : 
"I  know  all  that,  and  have  felt  it  and  more,  but 
such  feeling  is  transitory.  Then  you  are  not  going 
to  come  back  next  year?"     "Yes  I  am,  I  shall 


286    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

stick  to  you,  for  the  thing  means  much  to  me,  espe- 
cially if  I  can  rise  out  of  the  prairial  "West  to  the 
mountainous  East  once  every  year,  and  make  some 
kind  of  synthesis  of  the  two.  And  I  am  eager  to 
watch  the  outcome  of  this  philosophical  renascence 
when  transplanted  from  St.  Louis  to  Concord." 
Having  come  back  to  the  Hotel  we  parted.  Here 
I  may  be  permitted  to  say  in  advance  that  Emery 
after  some  years  will  quit  Concord  and  his  new 
home,  will  go  back  to  the  West  and  resume  busi- 
ness at  Quincy.  And  somewhat  later  Harris  will 
leave  for  "Washington  to  take  charge  of  his  new 
office. 

Still  another  little  adventure  before  I  could  get 
out  of  town  crossed  my  path.  I  was  always  fond 
of  diving  into  the  undercurrents  of  subliminal  Con- 
cord, where  I  might  catch  what  the  folk  was  think- 
ing and  gossping  about,  and  consult  that  truly 
American  oracle,  called  Public  Opinion.  Such  an 
oracle  was  quite  accessible  in  the  popular  workers 
of  the  place — the  artisan,  the  tradesman,  and  the 
neighboring  farmer.  It  was  soon  evident  that 
Concord  had  its  own  peculiar  town-soul  different 
from  any  other  I  had  ever  known  in  my  experience, 
and  so  it  presented  to  me  a  new  phasis  of  village 
psychology,  the  true  unit  of  all  social  psychology 
in  America.  I  never  found  a  foreigner  in  the 
place  a  real  inhabitant,  though  some  Irish  laborers 
lived  in  their  shanties  near  the  railroad  on  which 
they  were  employed.  And  all  the  residents,  at 
least  the  ones  that  counted,  had  a  long  pedigree, 


AFTER  SCHOOL.  287 

reaching  back  generations  and  traceable  still  in 
the  surrounding  graveyards  which  thus  kept  up  a 
continuous  ghostly  line  of  memories  of  the  past, 
and  created  a  sentiment  or  rather  a  consciousness 
impossible  in  the  new  settlements  of  the  West, 
where  I  was  reared.  For  instance,  Reverend  Peter 
Bulkley  was  founder  of  Concord  about  two  cen- 
turies and  a  half  before  the  School  of  Philosophy, 
and  still  there  was  a  Bulkley  and  a  Reverend  on 
the  ground  (not  merely  in  it)  and  I  talked  with 
him  (a  delightful  man  by  the  way).  This  town 
had  ensconced  within  its  small  space  a  more  unique 
individuality,  had  made  more  history,  had  been  the 
home  of  more  persons  of  distinction  than  any  other 
community  of  its  size  in  the  country.  And  well 
did  Concord  know  it.  Hence  a  very  pronounced 
local  pride,  which  could  become  in  extreme  cases, 
arrogance.  It  had  its  good  right  to  a  super-abun- 
dant share  of  self-esteem,  and  I  found  it  could 
easily  be  brought  to  assert  its  God-given  right,  as 
does  its  typical  hero,  that  minute-man  on  the  bat- 
tle-field near  the  bridge.  Hence  it  comes  that  Con- 
cord may  well  be  acclaimed  the  most  traditional 
town  in  the  United  States — which  fact  was  for  me 
a  good  experience  and  a  new  discipline. 

But  I  started  to  tell  my  final  adventure,  which 
took  place  in  a  barber  shop,  the  well-known  whis- 
pering-gallery of  the  town's  gossip.  The  razor- 
master  knew  me  for  a  stranger  by  my  straw-hat, 
and  by  my  un- Yankee  accent  of  the  Buckeye- 
Hoosier  twang,  and  the  rest  he  could  guess,  since 


288    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

about  all  the  strange  faces  and  costumes  then  in 
the  streets,  belonged  to  the  philosophers,  men  and 
especially  women.  With  the  first  soap-splash  of 
his  brush,  his  tongue  began  to  lather  me  freely: 
"Lively  times  down  at  your  church,  I  hear;  broke 
up  in  a  spat  ending  in  a  regular  fisticuff;  a  fellow 
from  Missouri,  a  right-down  border-ruffian,  such 
as  that  State  sent  out  to  Kansas  several  years  ago, 
tackled  Frank  Sanborn  in  a  tiff,  till  it  came  to  the 
knock-down. "  "  Indeed !  that  is  news !  But  which 
one  got  licked?"  asked  the  befoamed  shavee  with 
an  eager  twitch  up  from  his  suds,  whereupon  he 
caught  the  answer:  "What!  weren't  you  there? 
They  called  each  other  bad  names,  the  women  ran 
out  screaming  as  the  two  made  for  each  other,  at 
last  old  man  Alcott  rose  up  from  his  chair  and 
parted  them,  and  then  adjourned  the  School  maybe 
for  good."  The  fascinated  listener  though  under 
the  knife  queried:  "So  there  is  to  be  no  School 
next  year?"  "Can't  tell.  But  I  know  the  things 
people  are  buzzing  round  our  corners:  when  those 
borderers  invade  us  again,  we  shall  be  on  guard; 
we  shall  have  our  new  Penitentiary  ready  to  give 
them  a  free  lunch  over  by  the  railroad  station  on 
the  other  side  of  town,  as  a  kind  of  makeweight 
against  your  Hillside  Chapel  of  philosophers." 
Somehow  thus,  perhaps  not  exactly  bespattered  me 
with  his  chatter  the  grimly  humorous  beard-sur- 
geon as  he  slashed  his  scalpel  defiantly  about  my 
throat,  but  without  injury. 

Such  was  the  living  commentary  to  that  ton- 


BACK  TO  ST.  L0VI8.  289 

sorial  work  of  art,  with  whose  last  touch  I  sprang 
from  the  chair,  threw  down  my  dime  and  rushed 
for  my  train:  "Good-bye,  I  shall  see  you  next 
year,  if  they  don't  put  me  in  stripes  meantime." 
The  Concord  Penitentiary  alluded  to  in  the  fore- 
going conversation  was  an  actual  fact,  and  it  is  still 
busy  in  its  line  of  work  (I  suppose)  and  full  of  in- 
mates ;  but  the  Hillside  Chapel  on  the  other  side  of 
town  in  the  Emerson  quarter,  has  been  emptied  of 
all  its  original  folk  for  many  a  year,  not,  however 
into  the  rival  State-paid  institution,  even  with  its 
free  lunch  and  schooling,  as  far  as  I  know.  But 
hold !  there  may  have  been  one  exception  among 
the  philosophers !  Yes,  I  remember — but,  indul- 
gent reader,  you  will  have  to  wait,  or  turn  over 
several  pages  ahead  for  relief,  if  your  curiosity 
gets  to  hurting  you. 


Back  to  St.  Louis 

Thus  two  strands  of  this  Classical  Epoch  of  mine 
have  started  at  St.  Louis  and  at  Concord,  and  will 
continue  to  spin  themselves  out  for  some  five  years 
longer.  So  much  I  can  foresay,  looking  backwards 
now;  but  looking  forwards  then,  when  I  reached 
home  in  the  fall  of  1880,  I  could  see  nothing  but 
the  blank  pathless  cloud  of  futurity,  into  which  I 
had  to  take  a  plunge  for  life.  Only  one  prescribed 
part  I  knew  beforehand:  I  was  to  teach  in  the 
High  School  my  routine  of  instruction.    But  after 


290    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

one  year  this  remaining  shred  of  my  old  vocation 
was  torn  away ;  I  had  quit  it  and  still  more  it  had 
quit  me;  so  I  gave  myself  up  wholly  to  the  spon- 
taneous promptings  of  the  time,  as  they  kept 
knocking  at  my  heart. 

Classes  increased  more  than  ever;  I  soon  had  all 
I  could  attend  to  aright,  for  I  sought  to  teach 
creatively ;  mechanical  drill  was  reduced  to  its  low- 
est terms.  I  was  groping  for  the  higher  educa- 
tional institute,  quite  beyond  the  traditional  aca- 
demic establishment  though  at  the  time  I  had  con- 
sciously no  purpose  of  the  sort.  And  the  rage  for 
such  instruction  persisted  still  in  the  city;  that 
was  the  riddlesome  event;  for  these  classes  were 
not  confined  merely  to  my  own  field  of  work,  but 
bubbled  up  quite  everywhere  and  for  everything, 
planned  and  planless,  under  all  sorts  of  leaders. 
This  fact  veritably  startled  outside  observers  who 
came  to  the  city  with  their  fore-ordained  pre-con- 
ceptions  of  us  and  of  themselves.  Mr.  John  Albee, 
disciple  of  Emerson,  and  literary  friend  of  Harris 
from  the  East,  could  not  shake  off  his  surprise 
even  after  several  weeks  of  lecturing  and  visiting 
among  us;  he  kept  repeating  to  me  at  our  last  in- 
terview: "it  is  phenomenal!  I  never  saw  the  like; 
everything  here  has  smack  of  your  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment ;  I  read  some  of  your  philosophical  lingo  in  a 
leading  article  of  yesterday's  newspaper;  I  have 
not  talked  with  any  woman  here  yet  who  has  not 
philosophized  me  beyond  my  depth.  A  day  or  two 
ago  I  went  with  Miss  Blow  to  one  of  her  kinder- 


BACK  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  291 

gartens  to  see  the  children  play,  and  she  so  over- 
whelmed me  with  her  ponderous  Hegelian  nomen- 
clature in  explaining  a  little  game  of  the  babies 
that  I  heard  my  brain-pan  crack  like  a  pistol  shot. 
How  phenomenal,  yes,  most  phenomenal." 

It  is  not  necessary  to  give  all  the  variations  and 
the  eccentricities  of  these  studies.  I  have  no  record 
even  of  my  own  circle  except  some  memory  peaks. 
Enough  it  will  be  to  say  that  the  central  work  for 
me  and  mine  just  then  was  Homer,  who  suddenly 
gushes  up  the  original  well-head  not  only  of  Classi- 
cal but  of  all  European  Literature.  We  took  in- 
deed other  branches  by  the  side,  other  poetry  all 
the  way  down  to  Keats.  But  we  turned  at  the 
main  start  back  to  the  Iliad  and  Odyssey,  the  two 
nourishing  breasts  of  the  beautiful  young  Greek 
mother  of  our  civilization.  It  was  our  first  object 
to  become  acquainted  with  her  in  her  primal  crea- 
tive shape. 

"With  Homer,  indeed,  I  had  long  been  on  good 
reading  terms,  so  I  thought  when  I  opened  the 
present  course.  Far  back  in  my  Freshman  year 
at  College,  I  had  pushed  beyond  the  prescribed 
four  books  of  the  Odyssey  of  the  regular  curriculum 
and  had  read  the  entire  original  text,  and  dipped 
also  into  that  of  the  Iliad.  Moreover  I  had  never 
allowed  my  knowledge  of  the  Homeric  dialect  to 
pass  out  of  mind.  Still  I  found  now,  on  looking 
more  deeply  into  the  poet  creative,  that  I  had  never 
really  seen  Homer.  And  that  is  not  all.  I  went 
to  the  vast  pile  of  comment  of  every  description  in 


292    THE  ST.  LOUTS  MOVEMENT— PATtT  SECOND. 

the  libraries,  and  thus  I  picked  up  many  needful 
facts  about  him  and  his  world,  but  the  poet  in  his 
all-embracing,  well-ordered  wholeness  I  could  not 
find,  in  spite  of  or  possibly  because  of  the  mul- 
titudinous particulars.  What  is  still  more  strange, 
I  could  discover  no  adequate  guide  who  could  show 
me  how  his  works  were  built,  who  could  lead  me 
into  and  through  the  architectonic  of  his  two  spa- 
cious, noble  edifices.  So  I  began  at  this  time  one 
of  the  most  labyrinthine  but  fascinating  pursuits 
of  my  life — the  quest  of  the  architect  Homer  in 
Homer.  At  first  I  tried  to  believe  with  German 
Wolf  and  his  disciples,  whom  I  studied  with  in- 
dustry in  the  original,  that  there  was  no  inner 
genetic  order  in  the  two  poems,  that  they  were  a 
collection  of  ballads  more  or  less  skillfully  spliced 
together.  But  I  soon  found  myself  in  revolt  against 
such  a  view,  and  felt  more  deeply  than  ever  their 
spirit's  unity.  At  the  same  time  it  was  my  ulti- 
mate faith  that  this  spirit  must  have  its  distinct 
organization  in  the  poems,  and  the  year's  search 
was  to  uncover  and  to  express  this  poetic  struc- 
ture. 

While  thus  exploring  the  primordial  organism 
of  Homer's  poetry,  and  jotting  my  results  down  in 
scraps,  I  was  at  the  same  time  moulding  into  shape 
my  exploration  of  the  primordial  elements  of  Greek 
life  in  their  earliest  germs.  As  already  indicated, 
a  chief  incentive  to  my  Classical  Itinerary  was  to 
reach  the  first  sources  of  Homer  himself,  as  he 
lived  and  spoke,  in  the  still  living  and  speaking.    I 


BACK  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  293 

wanted  to  get  back  to  the  very  well-head  of  the 
world-civilizing  Greek  Tradition,  and  listen  to  it 
flowing  from  its  original  fount  of  the  heart  into 
the  primitive  word.     Then  I  desired  to  make  it 
talk  English  through  the  lips  and  the  types,  in  re- 
sponse to  my  own  deepest  need  of  expression  and 
impartation.     Hence  in  a  few  months  after  home- 
coming, I  had  my  Delphic  Days  in  print,  whose 
object  is  to  poetize  that  old  Greek  world  as  still 
alive  in  the  modern.     Then  I  started  to  give  the 
same  theme  a  different  form,  that  of  prose,  which 
records  my  personal  experiences  during  my  travels 
through  rural  Greece.     Thus  the  Walk  in  Hellas 
rapidly  coalesced  into  its  present  shape,   a  book 
which  has  its  own  independent  life,  but  may  also  be 
taken  as  a  kind  of  living  commentary  on  Homer. 
Another  cognate  work  I   conceived  at  this  time, 
which,  however,   took  many  suns  to  ripen  fully, 
namely  a  life  of  Homer,  constructed  out  of  the 
personal  hints  and  presuppositions  which  lurk  un- 
consciously imbedded  in  his  two  poems.    All  these 
books  of  mine  were  for  me  at  least  a  resurrection 
of  antique  Homeric  life  into  the  living  present,  or 
a  rejuvenescence  of  the  oldest  poet  into  youngest 
America. 

But  the  chief  Homeric  incident  of  the  present 
season  occurred  in  a  small  class  which  was  held  in 
the  private  parlor  of  a  well-known  lady,  who  had 
assembled  about  a  dozen  of  her  acquaintances  for 
the  purpose  of  taking  a  good  long  draught  from 
that  earliest  fountain  of  Literature,  Homer's  Iliad. 


294    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

We  had  already  taken  one  or  two  lessons  when  to 
my  great  surprise  Miss  Susan  E.  Blow  entered  the 
room  unexpectedly,  having  been  brought  by  one  of 
her  friends  who  was  a  member.  She  had  only 
come  for  a  single  visit,  as  I  understood  the  situa- 
tion. I  suppose  that  she  might  be  deemed  already 
the  most  distinguished  woman  of  the  city,  having 
done  a  famous  educational  deed  in  the  establish- 
ment of  the  Kindergarten  which  had  begun  to 
sprout  and  spread  from  St.  Louis  as  a  center  over 
the  country,  chiefly  through  her  energy  and  ability, 
even  if  it  had  been  known  elsewhere  in  America 
before  her  time.  But  the  Kindergarten,  though 
her  main  and  deepest  attachment,  was  not  her  sole 
interest.  She  had  studied  philosophy  under  Har- 
ris, from  whom  she  had  learned  the  Hegelian 
thought,  and  she  could  employ  its  subtleties  and 
their  peculiar  technique  with  fluency  and  insight. 
Theology,  especially  in  its  Calvinistic  form — she 
was  raised  a  Presbyterian — I  heard  Harris  declare 
to  be  one  of  her  profound  attainments,  though  she 
never  presented  that  side  to  me,  whom,  as  gossip 
once  whispered  me,  she  was  inclined  to  believe  as 
too  Greek,  if  not  altogether  a  heathen  backslider. 
Hence  my  astonishment  at  her  sudden  appearance 
in  a  Homer  class  of  mine. 

Miss  Blow  may  well  be  acclaimed  the  greatest 
public  woman  that  St.  Louis  has  hitherto  sent 
forth;  she  has  to  her  credit  the  largest,  most  en- 
during work;  hence  her  life  belongs  to  the  public. 
She  was  not  a  member  of  our  Philosophical  Society, 


BACK  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  295 

which  did  not  admit  ladies,  at  least  I  never  saw 
a  woman  present  at  any  of  our  regular  meet- 
ings, though  they  were  elsewhere  and  otherwise 
the  decided  majority.  That,  however,  counted  for 
little.  Miss  Blow  was  above  all  others,  the  fe- 
male representative  of  the  group  by  her  talent,  by 
her  knowledge,  and  especially  by  her  deeds.  In 
fact  she  was  at  her  deepest  a  will  character  rather 
than  speculative,  and  she  showed  herself  such  fin- 
ally by  her  career,  and  I  hold  likewise  by  her  fate. 
Still  she  philosophized  also,  ardently  and  pro- 
foundly, not,  however,  on  independent  lines,  but 
like  the  rest  of  us,  after  Hegel  interpreted  by 
Harris. 

I  first  heard  of  Miss  Blow  shortly  after  the  close 
of  the  Civil  War  at  a  dancing  club  composed  of 
young  gentlemen  and  young  ladies,  of  which  she 
and  her  sister  were  members,  being  especially  prom- 
inent as  daughters  of  a  distinguished  Congressman 
and  Southern  Unionist,  Henry  T.  Blow.  I  re- 
member well  that  by  these  golden  youths  she  was 
privately  set  down  as  too  bookish,  as  displaying 
quite  too  much  erudition  for  a  woman.  The  com- 
plaint was  interesting  to  me  as  it  could  not  justly 
be  made  against  a  single  one  of  these  young  fel- 
lows, nor  against  any  other  of  these  young  ladies 
as  far  as  my  information  extended.  Thus  Miss 
Blow  already  at  the  age  of  twenty,  more  or  less, 
had  won  a  certain  unique  distinction  in  her  own 
circle,  and,  on  account  of  her  family's  prominence, 
in  the  community. 


296    THE  ST. LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PABT  SECOND. 

Another  reflection  of  Miss  Blow  in  her  earlier 
years  came  to  me  by  chance  in  1868,  when  I  was 
staying  for  the  summer  in  South  St.  Louis,  enjoy- 
ing a  little  villa  with  my  wife  on  the  heights  above 
the  Mississippi.  In  some  way  we  happened  to  be- 
come acquainted  with  a  trained  German  pedagogue, 
somewhat  given  to  beer  but  of  keen  intelligence, 
who  had  been  a  private  instructor  in  the  Blow 
family  at  Carondelet.  He  repeatedly  dilated  upon 
the  surprising  ability  of  the  oldest  daughter,  Miss 
Susie,  in  her  study  of  German  Literature,  of  which 
she  had  read  under  his  tuition  some  of  the  chief 
authors.  The  time  was  that  peculiar  era  of  St. 
Louis  already  set  forth,  when  the  whole  city  was 
Teutonizing,  and  she  evidently  shared  in  the  com- 
mon trend.  He,  however,  had  his  German  criticism 
of  her  educational  bias,  declaring  that  for  a  woman 
her  culture  was  too  reflective,  too  philosophical, 
too  much  inclined  to  the  abstract  and  logical 
rather  than  to  the  poetic  and  emotional.  Another 
fact  he  let  drop  by  the  way:  he  once  happened  to 
meet  at  the  house  the  clergyman  of  the  family, 
who  had  been  summoned  to  give  spiritual  advice 
and  consolation  to  the  daughter,  who  was  in  some 
great  religious  crisis  of  life  through  which  she  was 
passing  with  no  little  distress.  This  somewhat  pri- . 
vate  matter  is  to  be  noticed,  since  it  has  its  signifi- 
cance in  her  public  career  and  character,  as  well  as 
in  its  relation  to  my  own  future  literary  work. 

No  sooner  had  Miss  Blow  entered  the  before- 
mentioned  parlor  and  had  taken  her  seat  beside 


BACK  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  297 

her  friend,  than  every  eye  in  the  room  seemed  sud- 
denly pulled  toward  her,  announcing  her  at  once 
to  be  the  center  of  that  company.  She  had  a  com- 
pelling personality  which  would  ray  itself  out  into 
her  environment,  wherein  she  showed  herself  as  a 
kind  of  sun  both  through  her  secret  attraction  and 
her  very  manifest  light.  The  lesson  had  already 
begun  and  was  proceeding  in  its  usual  way ;  but  I 
know  that  I  immediately  directed  my  look  and  my 
talk  toward  her,  she  became  at  once  the  queen  of 
that  audience.  Yet  not  by  any  display  of  jewels 
and  wardrobe;  she  was  the  worst  dressed  woman 
of  that  well-gowned  company,  as  I  distinctly  recol- 
lect; her  hat  lay  somewhat  askew,  her  hair  was 
riotous  and  her  shoes  were  unshined ;  I  thought  I 
noticed  our  elegant  hostess  inspect  her  with 
glances  betokening  criticism.  What  of  it?  Here 
was  the  heroine,  and  everybody  present  in  spite  of 
a  little  female  jealousy  perhaps,  acknowledged 
secretly  her  supremacy — I  the  teacher  being  therein 
foremost.  She  knew  well  her  peculiar  power ;  when 
I  aimed  my  eye-shot  at  her — and  I  could  not  help 
it — following  it  up  with  my  words,  her  naturally 
red  face  turned  redder  with  a  defiant  smile,  and 
flashed  a  response  which  I  traced  thus  as  writ  in 
her  features:     Come  on,  I  am  ready. 

Now  it  so  happened  that  the  lesson  turned  upon 
that  primary  problem  of  the  Iliad,  the  quarrel  be- 
tween the  hero  Achilles  and  the  leader  Agamem- 
non. I  went  on  to  expand  the  thought  which  lay 
yeasting  in  this  vigorous,   elemental  poetry,   and 


298    THE  ST- LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

which  gave  to  it  eternal  life,  so  that  we  are  study- 
ing it  today  in  St.  Louis  more  than  2500  years 
later  and  on  the  other  side  of  the  globe.  It  is  the 
perennial  conflict  between  the  individual  of  greater 
talent  or  perchance  genius  and  the  ordinary  mortal 
who  is  the  prescribed  wielder  of  authority.  Be- 
hold, then,  the  original  divinely  born  man  without 
dominion  (Achilles)  versus  the  regular  ruler  with 
his  transmitted  right  (Agamemnon).  Such  is  the 
collision  of  all  ages  between  the  individual  and  the 
institution,  between  this  one  single  great  Man  and 
associated  Man,  here  represented  by  the  everlasting 
Achilles  and  the  everlasting  Agamemnon.  I  must 
have  said,  for  it  was  already  a  sort  of  hobby  with 
me :  This  opening  strife  preluded  by  the  old  poet 
is  far  stronger  to-day  than  it  ever  was  before  the 
walls  of  ancient  Troy,  and  it  is  going  to  be  yet 
more  intensified  in  the  future.  Hence  antique 
Homer  never  gets  antiquated,  but  keeps  growing 
in  significance  and  magnitude,  when  we  truly  come 
to  know  him,  and  speak  with  him  face  to  face.  I 
tell  you  that  all  of  us,  you  and  I  too,  have  a  more 
or  less  vivid  lightning  flash  of  this  very  conflict  in 
our  own  souls  just  now.  And  this  is  the  problem 
of  us  all :  What  am  I  to  do  with  my  unappreciated 
Self  now  rasping  with  or  perchance  overwhelmed 
by  some  form  of  the  established  Order? 

Landed  upon  this  rock  of  utterance  the  lesson 
closed,  and  the  members  rustled  their  wraps  for 
starting  home.  I  could  not  help  watching  Miss 
Blow  during  the  talk,  for  she  always  commanded 


BACK  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  299 

the  personal  attention  of  every  eye  in  her  own 
right.  If  I  mistake  not,  I  saw  her  press  her  lips 
more  firmly  together  when  I  spoke  of  Authority's 
wrong  done  to  Heroship,  and  the  danger  thereof; 
did  she  even  clench  her  little  fist  a  little?  There 
was  certainly  some  response,  the  deeper  cause  of 
which  I  then  knew  nothing  about.  '  Indeed  when  I 
noted  her  reaction  on  the  lesson,  I  naturally  grew 
more  emphatic  in  speech,  and  laid  it  on  harder, 
with  hotter  illustrations.  Also  there  ran  a  warm 
streak  of  my  own  confession  through  the  talk,  for 
I  had  begun  to  feel  at  the  High  School  what  I 
deemed  an  unjust  nagging  of  me  from  the  powers 
above,  and  had  already  started  to  whisper  to  my- 
self: I  too  shall  withdraw  to  my  tent  when  the 
time  comes,  I  am  myself  an  unheroic  Achilles. 

As  I  was  passing  out  of  the  door,  Miss  Blow 
stepped  up  to  me,  and  asked:  "May  I  join  your 
class  in  Homer?"  "Certainly,"  said  I,  "glad  to 
have  you;  and  next  time  you  can  speak  out  your 
interrogation,  for  I  saw  its  mark  to-day  dancing 
all  over  your  face."  "Yes  I  know,"  she  an- 
swered, "my  features  have  a  bad  habit  of  tattling 
on  me,  especially  when  something  touches  me  in- 
wardly. And  I  could  not  help  noting  the  scope 
you  give  to  Literature."  Thus  she  parried  me  off 
to  a  less  internal  topic,  and  bowed  herself  across 
the  door-sill. 

After  the  next  lesson  or  two  Miss  Blow  came  to 
me  with  a  new  request:  "I  heard  you  speak  of 
Sophocles  in  your  remarks  by  way  of  illustration; 


300    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

especially  you  impressed  me  with  Antigone's  con- 
flict. "Would  you  take  a  class  comprised  of  my  ad- 
vanced Kindergartners,  some  ten  or  a  dozen  of 
them,  in  that  old  Greek  dramatist  ?  Come  and  have 
dinner  with  me  this  evening,  and  we  shall  talk  the 
matter  over."  I  assented,  and  then  walked  away 
somewhat  stunned  at  the  three  new  conjunctures 
which  her  interview  brought  up  to  my  mind.  First 
was  her  invitation  to  dine  at  her  supposedly  ex- 
clusive table;  secondly,  I  wondered  at  what  she 
meant  by  choosing  that  Greek  author  Sophocles, 
whom  I  had  never  taught  in  a  class  hitherto.  But 
the  third  incident  turned  out  altogether  the  farth- 
est-reaching in  my  life,  for  it  brought  me  into  con- 
tact with  Kindergartners,  of  whom  this  was  my 
starting  experience  personally,  though  I  had  often 
heard  of  them  and  their  distinctive  work  in  the 
city.  Harris  had  brought  about  its  introduction 
into  the  Public  Schools,  and  thus  given  to  it  the 
first  great  center  for  its  propagation,  which  was 
furthered  by  the  zeal  and  commanding  talent  of 
Miss  Blow.  She  was  now  in  her  best  years,  and 
showed  her  aspiring  and  limit-transcending  char- 
acter by  the  fact  that  to  her  pedagogy  (Froebel) 
and  to  her  philosophy  (Hegel  after  Harris)  she 
had  become  eager  to  add  literature  as  a  new  dis- 
cipline, even  if  she  knew  many  facts  about  it  be- 
fore. 

At  the  dinner  I  was  her  only  guest  beside  two 
other  members  of  her  family.  As  she  had  traveled 
a  good  deal  in  Europe,  and  had  been  at  Rome,  our 


BACK  TO  ST.  LOUTS.  301 

talk  began  at  once  to  push  for  that  famous  city  of 
which  she  showed  good  knowledge.  But  soon  I  was 
on  my  Greek  rambles  again,  in  which  her  interest 
seemed  to  increase  to  enthusiasm.  Hereafter  she 
will  react  from  this  Greek  trend,  deeming  it  and 
me  "too  heathenish."  But  at  present  the  longing 
must  have  come  over  her  to  know  and  to  be  her- 
self somewhat  of  the  Classical  Renascence,  which 
differs  indeed  from  her  Calvinistic  Regeneration, 
though  both  were  at  bottom  phases  or  stages  of  one 
great  world-religious  experience  of  the  race.  Also 
I  spoke  of  the  artistic  unity  and  completeness  of 
Greek  History,  with  its  two  supreme  historians, 
Herodotus  and  Thucydides.  "These  also  we  must 
have  in  our  class,"  she  said,  with  a  note  of  exultant 
will-power,  I  thought.  "But  first  let  us  take  the 
poets,  as  they  are  the  forerunners  and  the  prophets 
of  Hellas  realized, ' '  was  my  response.  ' '  Certainly ; 
then  to-morrow  afternoon  our  class  will  start  with 
Sophocles  in  the  board-room  of  the  old  Polytechnic 
Building;"  such  was  her  appointment,  as  I  passed 
out  the  door. 

This  little  unstylish  dinner  I  deem  worth  the 
words  since  out  of  it  sprang  a  very  important  life- 
line of  mine,  which  interwove  my  brain  and  tongue 
and  heart  with  the  Kindergarten  for  more  than 
forty  years.  Miss  Blow  held  of  the  larger  St.  Louis 
Movement,  and  she  must  have  her  picture  taken 
and  set  in  its  gallery,  of  which  she  was  decidedly 
the  most  prominent  woman,  being  too  the  greatest 
of  our  philosophic  ladies,  who  were  the  majority. 


302    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

She  rose  to  be  a  distinguished  public  character;  as 
writer,  as  lecturer,  and  especially  as  controversial- 
ist she  challenged  publicity,  and  she  is  of  such  im- 
portance that  she  deserves  to  be  seen  in  her  great- 
ness as  well  as  in  her  limitation,  for  she  had  her 
human  share  of  both.  Miss  Blow,  accordingly,  I 
commemorate  as  one  of  the  four  main  personages 
whose  careers  more  or  less  mutually  interlace  and 
unfold  in  the  same  general  direction,  and  together 
constitute  the  chief  propelling  forces  of  the  St. 
Louis  Movement  in  its  sweep  toward  ;its  goal. 
Hence  she  alongside  the  other  leaders  is  to  have  her 
monument  erected  in  this  book,  as  the  author  sees 
her  and  is  able  to  limn  her  character's  features. 

VI 

Back  to  Concord 

'Summer  of  1881  it  was  when  I  again,  with  an 
unusual  uplift  of  spirit,  turned  my  face  from  our 
hot  and  flaccid  Southern  city  toward  breezy  and 
stimulating  Concord  with  its  School  of  Philosophy. 
The  year  had  been  good  to  me  in  St.  Louis,  full  of 
surprises  and  fresh  outlooks;  it  seemed  one  long 
spring  of  a  burgeoning  young  world,  still  to  flower 
and  to  bear  fruit.  I  was  forty  years  old,  a  slow 
grower  but  seemingly  a  persistent;  what  I  was  to 
do,  if  anything  worth  while,  remained  yet  to  be 
done.  Still  I  think  I  may  look  back  at  this  year  as 
a  starter  on  several  new  roads  along  which  I  was  to 
travel  the  rest  of  my  days.    I  had  tapped  a  youth- 


BACK  TO  CONCORD.  303 

ful  life  for  me  in  old  Homer,  whom  I  had  known 
about,  but  never  known,  in  former  years.  And  yet 
further,  I  had  caught  many  a  glimpse  of  Homer's 
.supreme  poetic  succession  down  to  the  present,  that 
of  the  Literary  Bibles,  as  I  began  to  call  them, 
though  probably  I  was  not  the  first  to  give  that 
name.  But  the  thought  had  come  to  stay  by  me 
and  unfold  to  its  fulfillment  through  many  a  future 
season.  Such  was  the  swelling  germ  of  this  year 
which  time  will  bring  to  full  ripening.  Then  my 
new  vocation  had  definitely  started,  giving  me  a 
moderate  recompense  for  bread,  but  also  economic 
independence  for  the  pursuit  of  my  Super-voca- 
tion, which  I  myself  had  to  pay  for  as  the  price  of 
my  soul's  redemption.  I  resigned  even  my  half- 
day  at  the  High  School,  the  last  traditional  shred  of 
my  old  profession  in  a  prescriptive  institution,  for 
I  remained  a  free  lance  all  the  rest  of  my  life, 
even  when  I  taught  in  my  own  College. 

During  this  year  likewise  I  had  been  wandering 
back  and  living  over  my  Greek  outing  from  Athens 
to  Delphi,  the  written  notes  and  the  ever-gushing 
memories  of  which  I  had  been  kneading  into  a 
series  of  chapters,  originally  lectures,  which  be- 
came moulded  to  a  final  shape  in  the  already  named 
Walk  in  Hellas.  This  book  played  a  sort  of  musi- 
cal undertone  to  my  labors  of  the  entire  year — a 
character  which,  I  hope  it  continues  to  preserve 
and  to  inspire  even  now  amid  the  far-away  retiring 
years.  The  Classical  Journey  was  still  very  young 
in  my  soul,  being  as  yet  only  a  biennial  remin- 


304    TEE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

iscence  in  age.  Somehow  it  seemed  to  strike  a  per- 
fect chord  with  the  Homer  lessons,  each  not  only 
supporting  but  attuning  the  other.  Thus  I  passed 
a  happy,  and  what  is  far  more,  a  creative  year. 

But  I  must  not  forget  the  counterstrokes.  Of 
the  early  group  of  fellow-workers  I  stood  nearly 
alone;  the  older  members  of  the  St.  Louis  Philo- 
sophical Society  had  taken  flight;  I  have  already 
told  of  the  departure  of  our  Secretary  and  of  our 
President,  the  great  well-known  Prime-Movers. 
About  this  time  our  sole  clerical  member,  Dr.  R. 
A.  Holland,  quit  us  for  Chicago,  somewhat  disil- 
lusioned, I  think,  in  accord  with  the  city's  Great 
Disillusion,  which  was  already  announcing  itself 
in  our  civic  spirit.  He  was  one  of  our  ablest,  with 
keen  philosophic  penetration;  but  the  field  of  his 
highest  originality  was,  in  my  opinion,  not  the  re- 
flective but  the  imaginative,  with  his  unique  power 
of  metaphorical  expression.  That  is,  his  gift  was 
the  poetic,  even  if  he  did  not  versify.  I  think  too 
that  he,  more  than  any  other  member,  helped  make 
us  philosophers  respectable  through  his  social  and 
ministerial  position,  as  well  as  through  his  ability. 
For  after  all  is  said  apologetically,  the  most  of 
us  were  inclined  to  be  vagabonds,  or  to  be  re- 
garded as  such  by  the  stolidly  standardized 
community.  Dr.  Holland  liked  Emerson,  the 
grand  defier  of  tradition,  and  he  himself  often  de- 
fied tradition,  even  that  of  his  own  pulpit.  Emer- 
son's picture  I  once  saw  hanging  in  his  study. 
It  was  a  daring  thing  in  him  to  give  a  course  of 


BACK  TO  CONCORD.  3Q5 

lectures  on  Shakespeare  Sunday  evenings  in  his 
church,  despite  all  protest,  asserting  that  the  Liter- 
ary Bible  (as  he  once  told  me)  had  also  its  evangel 
which  he  was  not  going  to  neglect  or  abandon  to 
the  ungodly,  nor  yet  to  the  unchurchly — a  lenient 
hit  at  me,  I  thought.  Later  he  threw  open  his 
guild-room  to  our  Literary  Schools  which  were 
held  at  St.  Louis  in  conjunction  with  Chicago.  He 
also  made  his  pilgrimage  to  Concord,  being  a  warm 
friend  and  admirer  of  Dr.  Harris.  As  an  Epis- 
copalian clergyman  and  a  St.  Louis  philosopher, 
he  visited  the  Oxford  group  of  Hegelians,  with 
great  mutual  satisfaction,  though  the  details  he 
never  gave  me.  After  a  considerable  detour  of  the 
spiritual  shepherd,  around  to  Chicago  and  then  to 
New  Orleans,  he  came  back  to  St.  Louis,  where  he 
built  a  new  church  when  his  old  one  had  burned 
down.  On  my  return  to  the  city,  which  took  place 
a  good  many  years  later,  I  found  him  still  at  work 
in  his  philosophic-poetic  harness  and  had  some  pre- 
cious evenings  with  him  before  he  passed  away. 

But  picking  up  the  stitch  that  I  let  drop  a  page 
or  two  since,  I  may  begin  again  with  the  remark 
that  I  reached  Concord  in  good  trim  one  summer 
morning,  and  in  the  afternoon  I  found  myself 
floating  down  the  river  in  a  light  boat,  and  pluck- 
ing the  lilies  which  shot  up  into  a  kind  of  saluting 
nosegay  along  the  rather  sluggish  stream.  Now 
and  then  I  would  surprise  a  muskrat  taking  his 
meal  among  the  bulrushes,  or  a  mud-turtle  sun- 
ning himself  on  an  old  log  from  which  he  would 


306    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

give  a  sudden  flop  into  the  water.  I  dreamed  I 
saw  several  of  Thoreau's  birds  of  which  a  little 
covey  took  flight  as  I  landed  on  Egg  rock,  which 
seven  years  before  I  had  visited  in  company  with 
Mr.  Emerson  and  Mr.  Alcott  to  attend  a  Concord 
picnic.  Thence  I  sailed  down  past  the  old  battle 
field  and  tried  to  catch  some  whiff  of  the  once 
evoked  "Spirit  that  made  those  heroes  dare"  a  cen- 
tury ago  and  more.  Thus  I  sought  to  steep  my 
soul  in  the  memories  of  traditional  Concord,  which 
are  the  town's  most  exhilarating  atmosphere. 

Again  back  in  my  hotel,  I  found  a  note  on  my 
table  inviting  me  to  a  sociable  at  the  Old  Manse, 
Miss  Ripley  being  still  the  hostess.  With  all  these 
ancient  names  and  scenes  buzzing  through  my  head 
I  seemed  to  be  living  over  a  tale  of  long  ago,  not  in 
aged  Greece,  but  just  here  in  young  America.  Of 
course  I  went  to  the  party,  and  drank  a  cup  of  tea 
in  the  former  home  of  two  supreme  literary  geniuses 
of  our  new  world,  Emerson  and  Hawthorne.  As  I 
went  peeping  through  its  rooms  with  the  guests, 
Tradition  herself  rose  from  every  corner  to  salute 
us.  A  strange  blend  of  emotions  haunted  me  that 
night  into  dreamland,  for  I  could  not  help  feeling 
some  pulsations  in  common  between  Concord  and 
Athens. 

Next  morning  I  sauntered  down  the  road  to  the 
Hillside  Chapel,  with  some  forty  or  fifty  people, 
nearly  all  of  whom  were  new  to  me  and  to  the 
School.  Still  I  recognized  a  few  of  last  year's  faces. 
The  lecture  was  by  Harris  and  contained  some  of 


BACK  TO  CONCORD.  307 

his  heaviest  philosophic  cannonading  for  about  an 
hour,  whereupon  all  the  elements  present,  Transcen- 
dental, Platonic,  Hegelian,  were  turned  loose  into 
a  discussion,  weaving  a  many-colored  metaphysical 
web  of  the  universe  in  which  we  all  were  gossamered 
for  another  hour.  In  the  evening  my  talk  came  on, 
by  way  of  contrast,  not  philosophic  but  easily  de- 
scriptive, with  occasional  frolicksome  reflections. 
I  took  my  listeners  by  the  hand  and  led  them  from 
Athens  over  Mount  Pentelicus  to  Marathon,  where 
I  made  a  speech  in  the  wineshop  to  the  assembled 
Greeks.  Then  followed  an  excursion  to  the  Mara- 
thonian  plain,  including  a  brief  account  of  the 
battle  there  fought,  with  side  glances  at  the  Con- 
cord fight  for  the  sake  of  comparison,  the  one  her- 
alding perchance  Europe's  historic  independence, 
the  other  America's — at  which  point  several  tiny 
hands  in  the  audience  came  together  with  a  tiny 
clap,  the  act  of  some  Concord  ladies,  I  conjecture. 
Such  was  the  Greek-attuned  overture  of  my  second 
course,  audibly  harmonious  if  not  very  boisterous. 
Similarly  programmed  the  gracious  sunshiny 
days  of  Concord's  summer  come  and  go  with  many 
a  little  episode  heroic  for  a  moment  perhaps,  but 
hardly  worthy  of  special  fame.  On  the  whole  I 
believe  this  third  year  to  have  been  the  culmina- 
tion of  the  School,  its  best  and  happiest  year.  I 
attended  three  later  seasons,  but  there  never  was 
quite  the  same  upspring,  never  the  same  sponta- 
neous overflow  of  enthusiasm.  The  two  main 
threads  of  the  School  were  now  spun  alongside  of 


308    THE  ST.  L0VT8  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

each  other  by  those  two  ardent  philosophic  spin- 
ners, Dr.  Harris  and  Dr.  Jones,  propagandists  of 
Hegel  and  of  Plato  respectively.  Between  these 
two  speakers,  as  well  as  between  their  doctrines, 
there  was  felt  to  be  a  gently  throbbing  undercur- 
rent of  rivalry,  amicable  but  still  somewhat  fric- 
tional,  which  made  perceptibly  warmer  the  inter- 
est in  the  cold  abstractions  of  metaphysics.  Each 
leader  had  his  followers  in  the  audience,  and  both 
sides  kept  watching  intently  the  tournament,  yet 
with  impartial  sympathy  determined  to  give  the 
palm  to  the  best  man.  Of  course  there  was  no  pub- 
lic prize,  and  no  open  challenge,  still  there  pulsed 
a  tacit  emulation  which  at  last  crowned  the  victor 
in  secret  eulogy.  I  am  sure  I  often  heard  the 
whispered  decision  in  the  final  weeks:  Dr.  Harris 
has  taken  intellectual  possession  of  the  School.  This 
was  not  merely  my  judgment,  though  it  was  mine 
too ;  it  was  the  general  concensus  of  the  best  of  all 
those  present.  It  seemed  to  me  that  the  last  day 
of  the  session  wound  up  with  an  unspoken  but  dis- 
tinctly felt  award  of  victory. 

Now  the  significant  fact  must  not  be  omitted  that 
both  these  leaders  were  from  the  West  philosoph- 
ically, wherever  might  have  been  their  respective 
birthplaces.  Thence  both  had  come  to  the  East, 
to  the  very  home-town  of  America's  most  original 
thinking,  now  grown  somewhat  aged,  in  a  kind  of 
hidden  hope  for  the  future  of  philosophic  succes- 
sion. Three  summers  the  contest  had  already  lasted, 
with  an  increasing,  even  if  smothered  intensity ;  this 


BACK  TO  CONCORD.  309 

third  round  of  six  weeks  (I  think)  was  culminant 
and  triumphant,  if  I  have  guaged  it  aright.  Dr. 
Jones  will  come  once  more,  and  perform  worthy- 
service  in  his  cause,  but  he  is  soon  to  withdraw; 
at  the  final  sessions  of  the  School  he  will  be  no- 
ticeably absent,  which  must  be  deemed  an  unbal- 
anced loss.  And  we  shall  see  that  the  School  itself 
will  begin  later  to  pass  out  of  Philosophy,  or  at 
least  to  bolster  it  with  another  discipline. 

Moreover  this  third  year  is  to  be  the  last  in 
which  the  School  will  know  the  presence  of  the 
town's  first  and  greatest  Transcendentalist.  The 
following  Spring  (1882)  Emerson  passes  away, 
and  somewhat  later  in  the  same  year  Alcott  has  a 
stroke  of  apoplexy  which  he  survives,  though  quite 
broken  in  speech  and  mind.  Thus  the  link  which 
connects  the  School  with  the  great  Past,  seems 
shattered.  Still  some  members  of  the  early  Tran- 
scendental movement  are  alive  and  will  give  occa- 
sional addresses,  for  instance  Dr.  Hedge  and  Dr. 
Bartol ;  also  I  remember  the  discourses  of  two 
ladies,  Mrs.  Cheney  and  Mrs.  Howe,  with  their 
reminiscences  of  the  Yankee  golden  age  and  its 
Worthies,  especially  their  apotheosis  of  its  heroine, 
Margaret  Fuller. 

Meanwhile  I  continued  to  wander  through 
Greece  with  my  hearers  sitting  in  the  Hillside 
Chapel  for  an  hour  each  evening.  I  rode  over 
Parnassus,  the  seat  of  the  Muses,  on  the  back  of  a 
donkey,  at  which  passage  I  looked  up  from  my 
page  and  dared  extemporize:     "Not  the  first  time 


310    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

that  feat  has  been  accomplished  by  a  poet  without 
going  to  Greece  at  all — something  of  the  sort  I  may 
have  done  myself. ' '  Only  two  of  the  philosophers, 
as  far  as  I  observed,  tittered  a  little  in  response; 
but  a  heavy-booted  countryman,  who  seemed  to 
have  just  dropped  in  at  the  door  from  his  hay- 
field,  gave  one  horse-laugh  which  drew  the  whole 
audience  to  him  away  from  me.  I  found  out  after- 
ward that  he  was  a  neighboring  farmer  who  had 
come  there  for  his  wife,  as  she  was  a  philosopher. 
Nor  did  I  fail  to  show  to  my  little  company  the 
genuine  rill  of  Castalia  at  Delphi,  the  real  thing 
itself,  the  famed  fountain  of  the  Sisters  Nine,  in 
which  I  had  to  confess  how  I  saw  the  women  of  the 
nearby  village  bending  over,  not  as  undraped  God- 
desses in  the  bath,  but  washing  their  soiled  linen 
and  even  trampling  it  with  naked  feet  and  shanks, 
above  the  knees  sometimes  visible.  Still  I  did  not 
give  up  the  quest;  I  waited  till  the  stream  had 
purified  itself  by  running  off,  and  the  next  day  I 
took  my  symbolic  dip  in  that  pellucid  spring  of 
the  poets,  an  actual  palpable  spring  by  the  way- 
side. <So  I  prattled  how  I  laved  my  hands  and 
face  in  it,  then  thrust  my  head  down  into  its  little 
gushes  and  drank  of  their  first  bubbles,  and  would 
have  laid  me  flat  upon  its  kissing  ripples,  but  I 
hardly  dared  make  myself  so  purely  and  barely 
statuesque  before  the  passing  townsfolk.  Still  I 
pulled  off  shoes  and  stockings,  and  piously  waded 
the  limpid  shrine  of  Castaly's  Muse  in  a  kind  of 
prayer.     A  fanatical,  heathenish  action,  I  know; 


BACK  TO  CONCORD.  3H 

still  it  made  me  feel  happier  at  the  time,  and  it 
even  now  pleasures  me  in  this  classical  reminiscence 
of  the  far  foregone. 

But  what  means  this  ribboned  envelope  which  is 
put  into  my  hand  one  morning?  It  contains  an 
invitation  to  read  and  talk  about  my  Marathonian 
experience  next  afternoon  at  three  o'clock  near  the 
North  Bridge.  Yes,  yes,  I  shall  go,  I  am  only  too 
glad.  At  the  appointed  hour  I  stroll  down  the 
road  past  the  Old  Manse  toward  the  well-known 
locality,  and  find  a  new  audience  seated  in  the  open 
under  the  trees  which  form  a  leafy  overhead 
against  the  summer  sun.  The  place  by  the  river 
bank  levels  straight  down  to  the  Concord  battle- 
field, and  naturally  all  sorts  of  comparisons,  near 
and  remote,  political  and  historical,  were  drawn  be- 
tween the  Greek  and  the  American  far-trumpeted 
war-overtures.  "My  dear  lofty  friend,  the  World- 
Spirit,  was  present,"  I  emphasized,  "at  both  bat- 
tles, though  more  than  two  thousand  years  apart. 
I  tell  you  in  all  faith,  the  Gods  fought  along  in 
each  of  these  twin  conflicts,  more  or  less  visible  to 
their  respective  worshipers,  heathen  and  christian. 
Old  Herodotus  records  that  at  Marathon  a  new 
deity  appeared,  called  Echetlus  or  the  worshipful 
hero  with  the  plowshare,  image  of  the  fighting  far- 
mer of  ancient  Greece  slaying  the  invader  of  his 
sacred  soil  with  his  native  weapon.  To  him,  in  that 
land  of  divine  sculpture,  many  a  statue  rose  up  out 
of  the  faith  of  his  folk.  Look  yonder  just  across 
the  bridge ;  can  you  not  behold  the  modern  Yankee 


312    THE  ST. LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

farmer  Echetlus  leaning  on  his  plow  at  his  Mara- 
thon battle  with  his  native  weapon  in  hand  ready- 
to  meet  his  approaching  foe?  You  call  him  the 
Minute  Man ;  to  me  he  now  rises  up  the  old  Greek 
Echetlus  resurrected,  for  I  am  still  to-day  at 
Marathon,  and  I  dream  that  you  are  there  too." 

As  I  stretched  out  arm  and  forefinger  in  the 
given  direction  toward  that  sculptured  Yankee 
plowman  with  his  gun,  the  little  company,  nearly 
all  of  them  Concordites,  sprang  to  their  feet  and 
centered  more  searching  glances  possibly  than  ever 
before  upon  the  most  familiar  figure  in  their  town, 
as  if  to  see  in  him  also  the  Marathonian  hero,  who 
fired  that  strangely  universal  shot  heard  not  only 
round  the  world  but  down  time.  Thus  closed  the 
afternoon  in  a  kind  of  benediction  which  linked  to- 
gether Marathon  and  Concord.  And  as  I  glanced 
up  at  the  Old  Manse  on  my  way  homeward,  I  could 
not  help  seeing  the  good  old  Revolutionary  min- 
ister, Dr.  Ripley,  standing  with  uplifted  hand  at 
his  attic  window  from  which  he  is  said  to  have 
watched  the  battle  across  the  meadows  on  April 
19th,  1775. 

The  next  evening  was  the  last  talk  of  my  course 
at  the  Hillside  Chapel,  where  another  stimulating 
co-incidence  prodded  me  with  a  fresh  surprise.  A 
new  character  entered  my  horizon  unexpectedly, 
so  that  before  me  in  the  audience  were  three  men, 
all  Americans,  who,  independently  of  one  another, 
in  wide-apart  places  of  the  country,  driven  by 
their  own  spiritual  needs,  had  found  in  ancient 


BACK  TO  CONCORD.  313 

Plato,  especially  in  the  form  of  Neo-Platonism, 
their  supreme  truth,  their  satisfactory  explanation 
of  the  Universe,  their  divine  Order.  Dr.  Jones  of 
Jacksonville,  Ills.,  and  Mr.  Alcott  of  Concord, 
Mass.,  both  often  already  mentioned,  held  mainly 
to  this  world- view;  but  they  are  now  reinforced 
by  the  third,  Thomas  M.  Johnson,  just  arrived 
from  Osceola  on  the  Osage  in  Missouri,  most  apos- 
tolic and  single-hearted  of  all  modern  Neo-Platon- 
ists.  This  was  to  me  a  stunning  philosophic  con- 
junction, to  which  I  deemed  I  owed  some  recogni- 
tion from  my  old  Greek  experience. 

Accordingly  in  my  talk  I  narrated  to  the  au- 
dience, but  particularly  to  these  three  congenial 
souls,  my  haunting  reminiscence,  doctrine  dear  to 
the  Platonist,  of  a  former  life  as  I  ran  down  a  lit- 
tle knoll  at  Marathon.  I  could  not  there  disen- 
chant me  of  the  impression  that  I  was  an  Athenian 
Hoplite  or  heavy-armed  soldier  on  that  battle-field 
more  than  twenty-three  centuries  ago,  and,  reach- 
ing the  top  of  a  certain  hillock  I  felt  me  irresistibly 
pushed  to  repeat  my  old  Marathonian  charge  down 
that  slope  at  double-quick  against  the  Oriental  foe. 
"I  confess  to  you,  my  friends,"  I  spake,  turning  to 
the  Platonic  trio  in  succession  "your  Plato's  idea 
of  pre-existence  and  re-incarnation  became  to  me 
an  overpowering  reality  for  about  two  hours,  but 
I  was  unable  to  bring  it  away  with  me  from  Mara- 
thon. Still  on  that  spot  I  could  not  help  feeling 
that  I  had  been  there  before;  the  mountains,  the 
streams,  the  fields  with  their  rainbow  wavelets  of 


314    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

poppies  rippling  in  the  breeze  were  an  old  familiar 
presence,  though  this  was  my  first  conscious  glance 
at  them  in  this  life.  I  seemed  to  be  re-enacting  my 
ancient  actions,  I  stooped  and  picked  up  the  same 
white  pebble  thousands  of  years  ago,  I  reached  and 
plucked  the  same  flower,  and  I  drank  at  the  same 
gurgle  of  the  rivulet.  Still  more  deeply  I  felt  the 
Greek  hate  of  the  Orient  which  would  enslave  Hel- 
las; I  refused  to  cross  in  my  travels  the  dividing 
seas  to  Asia,  but  turned  away  with  repugnance 
from  its  people  and  its  spirit,  and  then  ran  back 
home." 

I  did  not  obtain  from  my  Neo-Platonic  friends 
any  response  concerning  my  strange  experience  ex- 
cept a  smile  of  non-committal,  as  I  construed  it 
after  one  questioning  eye-shot.  Hence  I  hurried 
off  spurring  my  discourse  at  once  to  Delphi,  where 
on  a  beautiful  April  day  I  climbed  again  the  Par- 
nassus and  looked  over  the  far  stretches  of  the  sil- 
ver-green sparkle  of  the  olive  orchards  for  the  last 
time.  There  I  perched  myself  upon  a  small  emin- 
ence and  experienced  what  I  have  already  called 
my  Delphic  Moment,  which  gave  a  sort  of  closing 
consecration  to  my  Classical  Itinerary,  and  under 
whose  urge  I  hymned  my  little  versified  valedictory 
to  Hellas,  as  I  turned  my  front  westward.  This  I 
read  as  my  final  paragraph  of  the  course,  and  made 
it  into  a  good-bye  to  Concord,  when  I,  facing 
about,  again  set  my  look  toward  the  Mississippi. 
Let  the  stout-hearted  reader  hunt  up  and  peruse 
that  elegiac  farewell  once  more  on  a  previous  page, 


THE  ST.  LOUIS  KINDERGARTEN  CLASS.     315 

if  he  thinks  he  can  stand  the  shock  of  the  sentiment 
and  the  meter. 

VII 

The  St.  Louis  Kindergarten  Class 

Than  ever  before  or  since,  with  a  heart  hope- 
fuller  and  more  heightened,  I  entered  St.  Louis  on 
my  return  from  the  East  in  the  fall  of  1881.  At 
once  the  work  began,  the  classes  increased  in  num- 
ber and  zeal,  the  St.  Louis  Movement  along  my 
lines  seemed  to  expand  and  to  push  ahead  to  a  new 
and  higher  stage  of  development.  It  is  true  that 
the  city-soul  was  still  brooding  over  the  Great  Dis- 
illusion, and  was  beginning  to  see  itself  falling  be- 
hind in  the  grand  competitive  "Western  race  of  ma- 
terial progress.  Meantime  my  little  group  con- 
tinued to  find  solace  and  perchance  some  compen- 
sation in  the  flight  back  to  antique  Hellas,  that 
ideal  world  of  long-ago,  unclouded  by  the  frowning 
present.  As  for  me,  these  two  coming  years  I  may 
call  the  buoyant  boyhood  of  my  Renascence,  even 
if  I  was  crossing  the  middle  life-line  into  the 
menacing  forties. 

The  most  important  and  the  most  lasting  fact  of 
this  season  I  shall  pounce  upon  first:  the  Kinder- 
garten Class  which  now  started  under  the  head- 
ship of  Miss  Blow.  I  was  the  teacher,  but  she  was 
the  ruler.  The  previous  year,  as  already  recounted, 
she  had  made  a  small  tentative  beginning  with 
Sophocles,  as  if  to  test  me  and  my  work,  about 
which  there  was  some  suspicion  in  certain  quar- 


316    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

ters.  She  had  evidently  made  up  her  mind,  from 
her  investigation,  to  introduce  Great  Literature 
studied  in  the  way  she  had  just  seen,  into  her  Kin- 
dergarten training-school,  which  certainly  had  no 
such  branch  in  it  before.  I  may  add  here  that  she 
remained  faithful  to  this  work  till  her  last  day,  re- 
inforced undoubtedly  by  the  advice  and  consola- 
tion of  Dr.  Harris. 

Moreover  she  possessed  the  ability  and  the  am- 
bition to  make  her  class  the  central  one,  and  her- 
self the  center  of  the  movement  in  the  city.  This 
she  did  easily;  the  leadership  came  to  her  by  a 
kind  of  natural  selection,  and  she  by  no  means 
shrank  from  her  pre-eminence.  She  was  well  aware 
of  her  own  gift,  and  she  asserted  it  strenuously 
after  her  way,  as  was  her  right.  Still  even  in  the 
day  of  her  triumph,  she  felt  the  hero's  fate,  per- 
chance tragedy.  "We  have  already  noticed  that 
peculiar  flash  of  self-revelation  which  she  showed 
by  her  sympathy  with  Achilles  in  his  conflict  with 
Agamemnon.  Something  of  the  same  sort  occurred 
in  the  study  of  Sophocles.  Strangely  she  seemed 
to  prefer  the  poet's  Ajax,  ordinarily  deemed  one 
of  his  inferior  plays  compared  to  Antigone  and 
Oedipus.  The  choice  along  with  her  reasons  struck 
me  as  another  instance  of  unconscious  confession. 
Ajax,  the  strong  man,  heroic  in  his  way,  unappre- 
ciated and  dishonored  by  his  own  people,  goes 
crazy  and  commits  suicide — a  tragic  character. 
With  a  feeling  which  seemed  to  bubble  up  from 
the   depths  she  expressed  her  pity  for  the   fate- 


THE  ST.  LOUIS  KINDERGARTEN  CLASS.     317 

stricken  hero.  Indeed  I  cannot  help  thinking  that 
with  her  pity  was  mingled  a  slight  shiver  of  fear, 
as  if  she  were  glimpsing  a  far-off  cloudlet  of  her 
own  possible  destiny.  Be  that  as  it  may,  she  ap- 
peared at  times  to  illustrate  in  her  words  and  even 
in  her  looks  the  famous  statement  of  Aristotle  con- 
cerning tragedy,  whose  function,  he  says,  is  to 
purify  through  fear  and  pity.  Some  eight  years 
later  I  had  to  recall  this  singular  sympathy  of 
Miss  Blow  with  Ajax  as  prophetic  of  her  own  lot, 
for  she  herself  had  then  become  a  sick  heroic  char- 
acter physically  and  mentally,  even  if  after  years 
of  suffering  she  recovered  herself  and  completed 
her  task  in  life. 

Thus  Literature  began  to  be  her  true  self-ex- 
pression, for  a  time  at  least.  And  her  spirit  went 
over  into  her  devoted  followers,  who  also  found 
themselves  in  the  characters  of  the  old  Greek 
dramatist.  Indeed  one  of  these  pupils  exclaimed 
on  a  time :  ' '  Old  Sophocles  must  have  been  a  Kin- 
dergartner."  ''Certainly,"  said  she,  "how  could 
he  help  it?" 

But  her  most  audacious  request  was  made  to  me 
in  the  fall  of  1882.  It  was  that  I  should  in  the 
forthcoming  season  conduct  her  stalwart  Kinder- 
gartners  on  a  far-flung  journey  through  the  re- 
mote and  difficult  Greek  Historians,  Herodotus  and 
Thueydides,  of  course  in  translation.  That  was,  to 
my  mind  the  climax  of  her  Classical  adventure.  No 
university  in  the  land  had  or  dared  attempt  any 
like  historical   course.     Once  before  in  a  private 


318    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

conversation  she  had  hinted  some  such  crowning 
aspiration,  but  I  deemed  it  a  mere  passing  spirit 
of  enthusiasm.  But  now  she  makes  ready  to  realize 
what  was  to  her  a  deeply  cherished  ambition.  "  It 
is  true  that  I  had  told  her  of  my  own  studies  of 
these  two  books  while  still  an  undergraduate  of 
Oberlin  College,  which  had  neither  of  them  in  its 
curriculum.  That  time  saw  the  outbreak  of  the 
Civil  War  when  our  nation  was  engaged  in  the 
making  of  its  greatest  history.  I  had  then  studied 
in  the  original  these  two  historical  works  supreme 
of  their  kind,  seemingly  in  unconscious  response  to 
the  events  of  the  day.  I  remembered  especially 
Thucydides  recording  the  innar  dissolution  of  the 
Greek  world  through  war  and  mutual  antagonism, 
for  I  was  pondering  over  his  pages  just  during  the 
secession  of  the  Gulf  States  headed  by  South  Caro- 
lina. In  his  weighty  bodeful  sentences  I  seemed  to 
hear  the  far-off  echo  of  our  own  political  destiny. 
Though  twenty  years  had  rolled  over  me  since 
then,  I  felt  strongly  the  desire  to  review  and  re- 
new this  early  stage  of  my  Greek  inheritance,  il- 
lumined by  my  recent  experience  in  Greece  itself. 
Moreover  Thucydides  is  as  tragic  as  Sophocles, 
both  being  contemporaries ;  the  historian  tells  the 
same  story  actually  which  the  poet  tells  mythically. 
Thus  each  is  a  commentary  on  the  other,  while 
both  reveal  one  common  underlying  Hellenic  con- 
sciousness of  the  time,  and  its  tragic  outlook  just 
at  its  height. 

And  to-day  Thucydides  rises  up  the  primordial 


THE  ST.  LOUIS  KINDERGARTEN  CLASS.     319 

prophet  of  the  present  European  dissolution.  As 
little  Greece  went  to  pieces  in  antiquity,  so  Europe 
seems  now  disintegrating,  from  essentially  the  same 
ultimate  cause.  Here  I  may  be  allowed  to  say  that 
I  felt  myself  often  driven  back  to  the  old  His- 
torian during  this  year  of  1918,  as  the  best  recorder 
and  reflector  of  the  present  political  earthquake. 
For  he  gives  in  small  what  is  now  happening  in 
large,  scattered  over  vast  spaces;  he  shows  the 
minute  Greek  germ  or  cellule  of  what  is  to-day  the 
world's  monster. 

This  study  of  the  Greek  Historians  was  the  cul- 
mination of  the  Greek  Renascence  in  St.  Louis,  and 
I  have  to  think,  the  beginning  of  its  decline.  It 
started  to  show  signs  of  having  spent  itself.  Like 
the  Greek  world  of  which  it  was  the  offspring,  it 
too  was  born  tragic,  at  least  in  St.  Louis.  Our 
lessons  in  Thucydides  began  to  partake  of  the  lot 
of  the  time  which  the  Historian  delineates,  and 
they  seemed  to  share  actually  in  the  fate  which  his 
History  foreshows. 

But  my  best  and  most  enduring  acquisition  dur- 
ing these  years  I  deem  to  be  my  communion  with  a 
new  spirit  in  human  life,  especially  as  regards  edu- 
cation. I  came  to  know  the  Kindergartners,  a 
unique  body  of  people  aflame  with  zeal  and  sacri- 
fice for  a  noble  cause.  I  felt  deeply  their  example 
and  its  inspiration,  since  I  too  had  my  call  and 
my  higher  duty  above  my  merely  bread-winning 
vocation.  The  best  of  them  showed  the  supernal 
spirit  of  service  to  an  Idea  which  transfigured  their 


320    THE  ^.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

lives  and  even  their  looks.  Modern  missionaries 
they  were  on  their  own  soil,  wherein  I  responded 
strongly  to  their  unspoken  but  soul-compelling  ap- 
peal. It  is  true  that  I  never  became  a  practical 
Kindergartner,  I  was  too  old,  and  besides  I  had 
heard  my  own  distinctive  call.  Still  I,  getting 
gray  and  bald,  squatted  on  the  floor  and  played 
with  the  little  children ;  then  I  would  crouch  down 
into  their  wee  narrow  chairs  at  their  low  tables,  try- 
ing to  be  one  of  them  in  sport  and  spirit;  or  I 
would  join  hands  with  them  and  dance  around  the 
circle  not  merely  for  pleasure  but  for  my  spirit's 
sustentation.  It  was  a  great  new  experience,  my 
dulled  life's  daily  renewal  from  the  fresh  foun- 
tains of  first  existence  bubbling  out  of  those  young 
hearts,  a  baptism  which  I,  the  solitary,  much-in- 
troverted student,  sorely  needed.  I  had  already 
experienced  that  my  own  children,  small  as  they 
were  and  fleeting,  had  given  me  a  blessed  discipline 
just  through  their  infancy.  But  now  I  was  alone, 
and  deeply  immersed  in  my  studies,  against  whose 
absorption  of  me  I  would  frequently  revolt  and 
run  out  to  play  with  the  little  ones.  That  helped 
to  keep  me  human,  and  more  of  it  would  not  have 
hurt  me.  But  thus  in  a  measure  was  supplied  me 
the  loss  of  my  family,  which  had  been  torn  from 
my  bosom  by  remorseless  fate,  and  I  was  bidden 
unto  doing  my  life-task  alone. 

Such  was  the  place  which  the  Kindergarten 
spirit  now  took  in  the  unfolding  of  my  career,  a 
place  which  it  retained  through  all  my  active  years 


THE  ST.  LOUIS  KINDERGARTEN  CLASS.    321 

till  I  had  rounded  life's  meridian  into  the  after- 
noon of  old-age.  In  a  sense  I  was  married  to  it  by 
a  vow  unspoken,  yea  unconscious  largely,  but 
sealed  in  the  soul's  deepest  loyalty.  I  believe  too 
that  the  St.  Louis  Kindergarten  spirit  was  at  its 
highest  during  this  its  early  period ;  the  primitive 
purity  of  the  cause  had  not  yet  been  tainted  by 
success,  by  fame,  by  partisan  and  personal  ambi- 
tion, with  its  bitter  antagonisms.  I  saw  and  felt 
the  work  when  it  was  still  small,  but  all  the  more 
consecrated;  in  that  state  it  engrafted  upon  nry 
very  existence  its  abiding  worth  and  its  ideal  de- 
votion. To  be  sure  certain  limitations  soon  began 
to  show  themselves  both  in  the  theory  and  in  the 
practice,  in  the  work  and  in  the  workers.  Even 
the  negative  woman  playing  her  subtle  part  in  the 
innocent  paradise  of  the  Kindergarten  I  thought 
I  glimpsed  already  once  or  twice. 

Such  was  the  fresh  baptism  of  the  spirit  which 
that  St.  Louis  group  of  Kindergartners  gave  back 
to  me  in  some  hidden  response  to  my  instruction. 
Now  the  creative  source  of  this  influence  always 
streamed  up  to  Miss  Blow  as  the  genius  who  pos- 
sessed the  power  of  infusing  herself  into  the  very 
character  of  her  pupils,  and  of  moulding  them 
over  into  her  own  image.  A  transcendent  gift  was 
that,  yet  not  without  its  dangers,  as  we  shall  have 
to  note  later.  But  at  present  it  made  her  little 
training-room  a  center  of  a  grand  Kindergarten 
overflow  not  only  into  the  city  but  into  the  sur- 
rounding states,  and  it  penetrated  even  to  Canada. 


322    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

Such  was  the  beginning  of  her  great  educational 
deed,  which  ranks  with,  or  possibly  outranks  the 
greatest  yet  done  in  America.  This  too  may  well 
be  deemed  a  phase  or  a  part  of  the  Renascence  em- 
braced in  the  St.  Louis  Movement. 

I  had  many  other  classes  about  town,  but  hers 
always  took  precedence,  and  indeed  made  itself  the 
typical  one  of  all  through  her  leadership,  keeping 
somehow  its  sovereign  place  in  the  heart  of  the 
business.    During  a  few  weeks  of  the  winter  months 
she  would  bring  Harris  from  Concord  to  give  lec- 
tures mainly  on  Religion  and  Philosophy  with  oc- 
casional excursions  into  Art  and  Literature.    Thus 
she  rose  to  a  kind  of  intellectual  primacy  in  the 
city,  such  as  no  man  ever  won  in  my  time.    For  a 
while  she  appeared  to  be  our  urban  sage,  more  dis- 
cussed, more  wondered  at,  more  influential,  I  think, 
than  any  other  personality  in  our  midst.  Primarily 
this  pre-eminence  of  hers  sprang  from  her  unique 
talent,  but  it  was  strongly  seconded  by  her  high 
social  position  among  the  old  reigning  families,  by 
her   independent    wealth,    and    especially    by   her 
sovereign  achievement  in  education  now  growing 
in  importance  every  day  over  the  whole  country. 
I  also  think  that  Miss  Blow  during  these  two  or 
three  years  was  at  her  life's  culminating  excel- 
lence, at  her  very  perihelion  in  her  total  career's 
orbit.     To  my  mind  she  never  again  reached  the 
same  native  illuminating  height  in  word  and  deed, 
though  she  afterwards  both  wrote  and  did  a  good 
deal.    For  her  later  work  always  showed  a  strain 


THE  ST.  LOUIS  KINDERGARTEN  CLASS.     323 

of  estrangement  from  her  nature's  right  environ- 
ment and  from  her  best  self.  But  at  present,  let  it 
be  emphasized,  she  attained  a  unique  spiritual 
hegemony  in  the  community,  and  her  influence 
kept  streaming  out  over  the  entire  land  in  new 
triumphs,  especially  for  her  Kindergarten  message. 

To  be  sure,  the  time  and  the  place  strongly  co- 
operated with  Miss  Blow,  who  had  the  insight  and 
the  good-fortune  to  launch  her  ship  at  the  favoring 
flood.  It  is  my  opinion  that  St.  Louis  during  these 
years  was  permeated  with  a  deeper,  more  aggressive 
and  more  wide-spread  intellectual  interest  than  it 
has  ever  shown  since.  Let  the  reader,  however, 
take  into  account  that  it  is  an  old  man  now  speak- 
ing and  looking  back  at  his  somewhat  distant  past 
through  the  glass  of  reminiscence,  which  has  the 
tendency  to  magnify  generally,  and  sometimes  to 
distort.  Still  I  meet  on  the  streets  of  the  city  to- 
day dozens  who  will  stop  me  and  spend  some  happy 
minutes  in  recalling  voluntarily  and  re-affirming 
that  long-gone  golden  age  of  intellectual  St.  Louis. 

But  I  have  to  repeat  that  signs  of  a  decline  had 
begun  to  peep  out  on  various  sides.  This  was 
manifest  in  Miss  Blow  herself,  who  started  to 
show  pronounced  indications  of  a  reaction,  espe- 
cially against  my  Greek  Renascence,  and  doubtless 
against  me  personally.  Religious  scruples  were 
rising  in  her  mind,  and  she  failed  not  to  let  them 
express  themselves  in  class.  A  spiritual  crisis  was 
coming  over  her  from  causes  which  were  whispered 
everywhere  among  her  friends.     It  was  even  said 


324    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

that  she  in  her  doubt  and  tribulation  had  thought 
of  taking  flight  to  the  bosom  of  the  old  Mother 
Church  of  Rome.  Her  Kindergartners,  so  some  of 
them  told  me,  found  her  often  in  deep  melancholy, 
from  which  they  could  drag  her  only  by  taking  her 
to  play  with  the  children.  Such  was  her  supreme 
relief,  and  it  indicates  the  reason  why  she  so  fer- 
vently embraced  the  Kindergarten — to  escape  the 
dark  fiends  which  she  thought  were  pursuing  her 
and  hers  with  some  fatality — possibly  the  imagined 
counterstroke  of  her  genius.  It  was  no  secret  that 
Miss  Blow's  life  was  passed  in  the  midst  of  some 
long  private  trouble  which  colored  her  whole  life, 
and  which  haunted  her  after  she  quit  St.  Louis, 
and  was  at  least  one  cause  of  a  protracted  malady, 
ever  threatening  death,  from  which,  however,  she 
victoriously  rescued  herself  by  sheer  will-power — 
personally  her  most  characteristic  action,  and  pos- 
sibly her  grandest  fate-coercing  triumph.  I  was 
not  her  confidant,  still  she  could  not  help  confess- 
ing herself  even  in  a  brief  answer  before  her  class. 
I  have  seen  that  peculiar  look  of  destiny  flush  sud- 
denly her  face,  as  if  it  welled  up  from  the  last 
depths  of  her  experience,  though  she  said  nothing. 
Still  she  could  be  merry,  and  I  have  remarked  her 
once  or  twice  a  little  boisterous.  Her  conversation 
at  its  best  was  tinged  with  a  smiling  streak  of 
humorous  irony,  which,  however,  seemed  quite  to 
disappear  in  her  writings. 

In  relation  to  myself,  it  was  evident  that  a  rift 
had  started  and  was  growing  in  depth  and  inten- 


THE  ST.  LOUIS  KINDERGARTEN  CLASS.     325 

sity.     Moreover  the  breach  could  not  be  healed, 
since  it  reached  down  to  a  fundamental  diversity  of 
character,  as  well  as  to  a  difference  of  view  con- 
cerning the  nature   of  education.     The  disagree- 
ment became  pronounced  when  Miss  Blow  tried  to 
subject   my  work   and  myself  to  Dr.   Harris.     I 
asserted  very  decidedly  my  right  of  independent 
self-development.     And  I  insisted  that  true  edu- 
cation ought  to  be  based  ultimately  upon  that  same 
right  in  every  individual,  which  doctrine  crossed 
her  inborn  grain  and  possibly  her  secret  ambition. 
Harris  was  unfolding  on  his  own  lines  at  that  time, 
chiefly    in    the    religious    sphere;    really    he    was 
Catholicizing,  wherein  I  could  not  follow  him.    We 
were  friends  and  both  belonged  to  the  St.  Louis 
Movement,  which  ought  to  be  large  enough,  so  I 
thought,   to  contain  us  both   in   our   fullest   and 
freest   evolution.     But  that  was   just  what  Miss 
Blow  would  not,  indeed  could  not  stand  for ;  there 
must  be  subordination,  prescription,  personal  dis- 
cipleship.    She  was  a  will-character,  and  was  going 
to  enforce  her  decree,  especially  as  she  now  felt  her- 
self to  be  the  literary  dictator  of  our  St.  Louis 
work.    And  this  she  was,  more  than  any  other  per- 
son, and  by  rightful  pre-eminence,  in  my  opinion. 
But  her  very  power  seemed  to  destroy  her  gift  of 
co-operation;  she  could  not  tolerate,  could  not  as- 
sociate strong  independent  individualities;  hence 
she  failed  to  train  her  pupils  to  self-determination, 
the  topmost  flower  of  instruction.    This  in  spite  of 
the  fact  that  she  was   always   emphasizing  self- 


326    THE  ST.L0UI8  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

activity,  the  favorite  educational  category  of  Dr. 
Harris.  Here  too  lies  probably  the  main  reason 
why  she  succeeded  better  with  women  than  with 
men. 

Other  classes  of  mine  over  town  wound  up  their 
season's  work  in  a  satisfied  frame  of  mind,  and  the 
outlook  bespoke  promise.  But  the  central  class 
ended  in  a  distinct  undertone  of  disharmony,  and 
our  happy  Greek  Renascence  threatened  to  close 
tragically,  like  the  Greek  Drama  and  the  Greek 
History  which  we  had  just  studied.  How  about 
next  season?  Not  a  word  from  either  side.  Let 
the  boiling  summer  clarify  the  turbid  waters,  if  it 
can,  during  the  intervening  vacation.  Soon  I  had 
packed  up  and  was  off  for  Concord,  where  I  was  on 
the  programme  for  another  course,  dealing  with 
Homer  and  the  Greek  Religion.  Thus  I  edged  into 
the  Philosophical  School  one  of  my  Literary  Bibles, 
the  second  of  the  sort  in  my  courses  there,  to  be 
followed  by  a  third — whereof  a  later  explanation 
will  be  due  in  its  own  good  time. 

VIII 

Psychology  Appears  at  Concord 

By  means  of  the  first  word  of  this  caption  I 
would  emphasize  the  appearance  of  a  weighty  new 
fact  in  the  School,  in  the  time,  and  somewhat  dimly 
in  myself.  For  my  attention  was  now  challenged 
by  the  new  Psychology  to  a  first  distinct  encounter, 


PSYCHOLOGY  APPEARS  AT  CONCORD.        327 

as  far  as  I  can  at  present  remember ;  both  the  name 
and  the  thing  swept  across  my  mental  horizon  and 
left  their  impress,  which,  however,  is  to  lie  dormant 
yet  yeasting  for  many  years.  I  would  have  little 
or  nothing  to  say  of  this  session  of  the  School  (in 
1883)  so  like  was  it  on  the  whole  to  former  ones, 
were  it  not  for  the  course  entitled  Three  Lectures 
on  Psychology,  by  Professor  William  James  of 
Harvard  University. 

Such  was  the  subject  and  such  was  the  man  now 
announced,  both  belonging  to  the  future  more  than 
any  of  us  or  anything  of  us.  Professor  James  was 
then  almost  unknown,  though  over  forty  years  old ; 
he  had  not  yet  written  his  books,  though  his  name 
had  been  appended  to  some  magazine  articles;  I 
had  noticed  especially  those  in  the  Journal  of 
Speculative  Philosophy,  though  with  no  pronounced 
attraction.  Nor  had  I  ever  heard  Harris  speak  of 
James  the  son,  though  he  often  mentioned  the 
father,  eminent  for  his  advocacy  of  Swedenborg 
and  among  us  for  his  declared  hostility  to  Hegel. 
And  Psychology  as  the  new  sovereign  science  was 
then  just  beginning  to  peep  out  of  its  egg-shell 
here  in  America,  showing  its  early  callow  features 
copied  mainly  from  the  class-room  of  the  German 
University  where  it  had  been  hatched.  To  be  sure, 
Psychology  as  an  old  discipline  tacked  on  to  Philos- 
opy  was  known  to  all  readers  of  the  great  thinkers 
back  to  Aristotle  and  the  ancient  Greeks.  But  this 
course  of  lectures  suggested,  though  it  hardly  pro- 
claimed or  revealed,  the  new-world  birth  of  an  old- 


328    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

world  science.  I  doubt  if  James  himself  was  yet 
fully  aware  of  himself  and  of  his  theme,  for  he 
seemed  often  very  tentative  and  experimental;  he 
was  already  a  pragmatist  before  pragmatism;  he 
could  not  help  practicing  his  basis  consciousness 
before  he  had  evolved  it  and  formulated  it  into  his 
far-famed  theory. 

But  how  strange  it  all  appears  now,  as  I  look 
behind  me  through  the  ageing  decades!  Nobody 
then  in  Concord,  not  a  single  philosopher — and  we 
privately  talked  over  James  and  his  subject  a  good 
deal  outside  the  public  discussion — had  the  least 
inkling  of  a  forecast  concerning  the  great  future 
import  of  the  man  and  his  theme.  I  asked  Harris 
about  both,  but  policy  bade  him  hold  his  tongue, 
though  it  permitted  him  to  give  one  little  shake  of 
his  head  in  doubt.  Professor  George  Howison  was 
there,  and  I  quizzed  him:  Tell  me  what  does  the 
thing  mean  and  whither?  Howison,  who  was  at 
that  time  located  in  Boston,  and  who  had  looked 
into  the  university  instruction  of  James,  so  he 
stated  to  me,  unhesitatingly  declared  then  and 
there:  "I  cannot  quite  make  out  what  James  is 
after,  and  I  never  found  anybody  at  Harvard  who 
could."  Still  James  had  appreciators  in  the  Con- 
cord set.  These,  as  far  as  my  knowledge  went, 
were  mainly  lady  philosophers  in  attendance  at 
the  School,  a  little  group  of  whom  I  once  asked: 
"How  do  you  like  James  and  his  Psychology?" 
They  all  expressed  themselves  as  charmed  by  the 
man   and  by  his  waywardness   of  word  and   of 


PSYCHOLOGY  APPEARS  AT  CONCORD.        329 

thought.  One  of  them  struck  off  a  sentence  like 
this :  "lam  enraptured  with  his  freakish  oddities, 
I  love  to  ramble  after  him  through  the  fantastical 
jungles  of  human  subjectivity."  I  have  forgotten 
my  answer,  if  I  gave  any ;  but  now  I  find  me  re- 
flecting to  myself:  Yes,  another  case  of  like  lik- 
ing like. 

And  here  let  us  look  forward  seven  years  from 
the  time  of  this  course  of  lectures.  In  1890  James 
published  his  two  considerable  volumes  under  the 
one  title,  Principles  of  Psychology.  The  work, 
though  of  the  heavy  sort,  had  a  surprisingly  high- 
soaring  popularity  in  America,  and  its  fame  swept 
across  to  England  and  beyond.  Evidently  the  au- 
thor had  just  hit  the  mood  of  the  time,  and  had 
given  expression  to  a  dawning  consciousness.  The 
reception  of  the  book  seemed  to  indicate  that  the 
new  thought-era  was  to  be  psychological,  and  the 
new  world-discipline  was  to  be  Psychology.  Of 
course  James  does  not  directly  say  this,  and  I 
doubt  if  he  himself  then  discerned  the  full  bearing 
of  his  prophetic  initiative. 

On  the  other  hand  that  same  year  (1890)  saw 
the  appearance  of  a  much  smaller  yet  parallel  book 
by  a  Concord  philosopher,  the  foremost  of  us  all. 
It  was  rather  a  modest-garbed  volume,  which  was 
named  Hegel's  Logic,  being  written  by  Dr.  W.  T. 
Harris.  The  writer's  proclaimed  intention  was  to 
popularize  what  has  been  already  called  the  hard- 
est book  in  the  world.  I  had  to  confess  to  him  that 
his  interpretation  of  it  in  English  was  often  more 


330    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

difficult  for  me  than  the  original  Hegel  himself. 
A  dozen  years  later  he  told  me  with  hesitating  sigh 
that  he  had  not  succeeded  in  his  design,  that  his 
hook  had  been  a  failure.  But  after  two  or  three 
melancholy  reflections  he  brisked  up  and  affirmed 
with  decision:  "Now  I  am  going  to  make  the 
whole  thing  over  in  a  new  edition."  On  this  work 
he  was  engaged  when  he  passed  away.  Thus  that 
Hegelian  Logic  was  to  him  a  veritable  "Book  of 
Fate,"  with  which  he  wrestled  all  his  mature  life 
till  he  sank  down  at  grips  with  it  still  in  his  last 
moments. 

Meanwhile  during  these  same  dozen  years  let  us 
glance  at  the  prodigious  ascent  and  flight  of  Pro- 
fessor James  quite  round  the  whole  world.  For 
not  so  many  months  later  there  has  arisen  such  a 
popular  demand  for  his  work  that  he  condenses  it 
into  a  text  book  (1892),  which  in  its  field  practic- 
ally takes  possession  of  the  higher  educational  in- 
stitutions throughout  the  entire  land,  giving  a 
mighty  uplift  to  the  new  Psychology,  at  least  to 
his  form  of  it.  He  was  now  probably  deemed  Har- 
vard's most  distinguished  Professor.  Moreover  we 
read  him  heralded  America's  greatest  philosopher, 
not  merely  her  greatest  psychologist.  And  we  are 
surprised  to  learn  that  in  his  university  instruc- 
tion he  has  passed  from  his  professorship  of  Psy- 
chology to  that  of  Philosophy.  Indeed  in  the 
course  of  his  academic  career  he  has  made  the 
same  change  twice,  as  if  he  were  somewhat  uncer- 
tain whether  he  were  a  philosopher  or  a  psycholo- 


PSYCHOLOGY  APPEARS  AT  CONCORD.        331 

gist;  perchance  he  felt  himself  both  somehow  in- 
termingled, and  at  times  interwarring. 

It  would  seem  that  the  best  commentary  on 
James'  doctrine  is  his  biography.  In  one  friendly 
account  of  him  I  find  no  less  than  ten  different 
changes  of  vocation.  He  appeared  to  be  on  the 
hunt  after  a  working  hypothesis  for  himself  during 
his  whole  life,  shifting  about  a  good  deal  in  search 
of  practical  consequences  and  never  quite  satisfied. 
Thus  his  biography  has  a  pragmatic  cast  from 
start  to  finish.  At  first  he  was  an  artist,  and  some- 
what of  this  artistic  vein  trickles  through  him  to 
the  last.  Then  he  was  a  scientist  of  various  kinds, 
culminating  seemingly  in  his  study  of  Physiology 
at  Berlin  (1867),  and  this  physiological  element 
stayed  with  him  as  the  substrate  of  his  later  work. 
But  soon  we  find  him  transferred  in  his  instruc- 
tion to  Philosophy,  from  which  he  went  over  to 
Psychology,  and  then  back  again  to  Philosophy  of 
which  he  was  Professor  when  he  retired.  Now  this 
brief  snatch  of  biography  shows  not  merely  James 
but  the  time  in  its  deepest  spiritual  transition, 
with  many  an  oscillation  back  and  forth  between 
Philosophy  and  Psychology.  Such  repeated  fluctua- 
tion betokens  the  struggle  of  our  western  world  to- 
ward a  new  universal  discipline  as  the  successor  of 
Philosophy,  toward  a  fresh  interpretation  of  the 
Universe  in  terms  of  the  American  institutional 
consciousness.  Thus  James  in  his  work  and  in  his 
life  has  the  value  of  mirroring  his  age  at  an  epochal 
turning-point. 


332    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

From  these  two  significant  contemporaneous  cir- 
cumstances, one  is  compelled  to  the  inference  that 
Dr.  Harris  in  his  book  was  not  in  touch  with  the 
trend  of  the  time,  while  Prof.  James  had  at  least 
tapped  the  fountain  of  the  future.  Whatever  ex- 
ceptions might  be  taken  to  the  latter 's  somewhat 
choppy  treatment  of  his  subject,  and  to  his  short- 
comings in  thought,  he  had  uttered  and  emphasized 
that  creative  and  prophetic  word,  Psychology, 
which  meant  in  its  fulfilment  a  new-born  world  of 
thought.  I  heard  the  word  at  Concord  and  pon- 
dered and  wondered,  but  did  not  then  even  for- 
bode  its  full  meaning  for  my  own  life,  or  for  the 
coming  time. 

The  year  during  which  Prof.  James  lectured  at 
Concord  was  the  fifth  of  the  School,  whose  course 
then  had  reached  its  culmination.  Philosophically 
Harris  was  enthroned  over  all,  and  the  Hegelians 
held  the  citadel.  Their  earlier  competitors,  the 
Platonists,  were  withdrawing  and  soon  quite 
dropped  out  of  the  race.  Such  was  the  general 
philosophic  situation  when  James  appeared  with 
his  Psychology,  which  was  probably  intended  as  a 
kind  of  antidote.  For  James  had  already  entered 
the  writing  arena  as  a  pronounced  if  not  bitter 
antagonist  of  Hegel.  The  preceding  year  (1882) 
he  had  printed  in  a  well-known  philosophical  Jour- 
nal his  essay  called  "Some  Hegelisms",  in  which 
he  seeks  to  make  an  end  of  the  German  philosopher, 
planting  his  front  blow  thus:  "Hegel's  dialectical 
method  I  believe  to  be  wholly  abominable  when 


PSYCHOLOGY  APPEARS  AT  CONCORD.        333 

worked  by  concepts  alone."  Herein  one  may  well 
hear  the  eminent  professor  telling  on  himself,  and 
marking  with  emphasis,  almost  with  passion,  his 
philosophic  limitation.  For  that  subtle  dialectic 
process  which  old  Eleatic  Zeno  first  glimpsed,  which 
was  seized  upon  and  exploited  not  a  little  by 
Greek  Plato,  especially  in  his  Parmenides,  and 
which  Hegel  sublimated  into  the  inner  driving- 
wheel  of  his  whole  Logic  and  hence  of  the  Uni- 
verse, James  confesses  that  he  hates,  and  will 
fling  to  the  Furies.  Doubtless  he  does  not  inti- 
mately and  creatively  grasp  it,  for  it  is  not  to 
be  gotten  by  a  passing  ordinary  act  of  intellec- 
tion, but  it  must  be  long  lived  with  and  wrestled 
with  and  wrought  with.  Here  too  we  may  note 
also  that  dislike  of  all  abstract  thought  which 
winds  through  and  bounds  his  whole  mentality. 
And  yet  James  could  not  leave  Philosophy  alone 
but  always  went  back  to  it,  as  the  very  goal  of  his 
spirit's  deepest  striving — to  Philosophy  which  may 
be  regarded  as  the  science  of  pure  abstraction  itself. 
Is  not  his  chief  term  Pragmatism  an  abstract  con- 
concept?  A  good  deal  of  criticism  it  evoked  when 
it  was  first  broached,  wherein  he  might  have  seen 
that  it  too  was  dialectical. 

Connected  with  the  history  of  the  Concord 
School  is  another  utterance  of  James  in  his  printed 
essays.  He  has  announced  the  arrival  in  a  philo- 
sophic club  at  Boston  of  two  young  business  men 
from  Illinois,  enthusiastic  Hegelians,  "who  with 
little   or  no   knowledge   of   German  had   actually 


334    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

possessed  themselves  of  a  manuscript  translation 
of  the  entire  three  volumes  of  the  Logic  made  by 
an  extraordinary  Pomeranian  immigrant  named 
Brockmeyer."  Such  is  the  faint  rather  spectral 
glimpse  which  the  Harvard  Professor  has  caught 
of  the  strange  original  demiurge  of  the  St.  Louis 
Movement  and  of  its  big  "Book  of  Fate."  Brock- 
meyer by  the  way  was  not  a  Pomeranian  but  a 
Prussian  of  Minden.  Moreover  James  observes 
that  the  said  Club,  of  which  he  was  a  member,  "had 
gone  over  a  good  part  of  Hegel's  Logic  under  the 
self-constituted  leadership"  of  those  two  green 
philosophic  suckers  from  Quincy,  Illinois,  who  had 
never  been  at  a  German  University,  and  who  could 
not  even  read  the  original  text  of  their  master, 
digging  laboriously  their  knowledge  of  his  doc- 
trine up  from  Brockmeyer 's  barbarous  Teutonic- 
English.  It  could  only  be  deemed  an  act  of  un- 
paralled  presumption  on  the  part  of  those  insolent 
"Westerners,  as  we  may  hear  in  an  undertone  out 
of  the  epithet  self-constituted,  and  some  other 
nuances  of  style.  And  all  this  took  place  in  the 
sacred  precincts  of  Boston  and  Concord,  for  in  the 
latter  place  these  bold  Illinoisans  had  actually 
settled  down  as  permanent  residents  planting  them- 
selves as  local  pillars  of  the  Concord  School  of 
Philosophy. 

And  here  I  may  dare  propound  a  problem  to 
myself,  and  to  my  reader  also,  if  he  will  not  get 
angry.  Did  you  ever  think,  when  hearing  or  read- 
ing James,  that  he  at  times  shows  a  streak  of  that 


PSYCHOLOGY  APPEARS  AT  CONCORD.        335 

peculiar  psychical  distemper  known  to  outsiders  as 
Bostonitis — not  dangerous,  hardly  offensive,  but 
symptomatic  of  some  mighty  local  and  possibly 
personal  superiority  ?  This  runs  often  through  the 
man  a  vein  of  subtle  sarcastic  contempt  for  the 
rest  of  the  world,  especially  for  the  savage  West, 
tincting  the  manner,  the  look,  the  style  of  the  Pro- 
fessor as  well  as  the  content  of  his  utterance.  All 
of  which,  however,  cannot  seriously  affect  the 
inner  worth  of  his  message. 

Now  I  am  inclined  to  believe  that  just  this  meet- 
of  James  with  these  two  fervent  believers  in  Hegel 
and  their  one  Great  Book  was  an  important  epoch 
in  his  philosophical  development.  He  did  not  say 
so  and  probably  did  not  think  so,  and  might  even 
have  resented  such  a  statement,  still  he  bore  the 
impress  of  this  experience  through  life,  even  if 
by  way  of  opposition.  For  he  now  saw  men  who 
had  a  living  faith  in  Philosophy,  and  were  ready 
to  impart  it  with  a  missionary  zeal,  expounding 
it  to  him  and  the  Club  from  the  strange  hieroglyphs 
of  the  "three  big  folios"  of  their  manuscript  Bible. 
Moreover  he  had  brushed  against  the  greatest  Ger- 
man world-book  of  Philosophy,  not  excepting 
Kant's  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,  of  which  it  is 
indeed  the  sovereign  remedial  corrective,  bringing 
intellectual  restoration  after  overcoming  man's 
ultimate  denial.  I  dare  think  that  Professor  James 
must  have  gotten  lasting,  even  if  unconscious  value 
from  the  scene  and  the  man  thus  described  by 
him:    "A  more  admirable  homo  unius  libri  than 


336    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

one  of  them  with  his  three  big  folios  of  Hegelian 
manuscript  I  have  never  had  the  good  fortune  to 
know."     Doubtless   this   passage   is   tuned   to   an 
ironical  note,  still  the  writer  of  it  never  forgot, 
never  could  rid  himself    of    the    impressive  fact 
which  he  here  witnessed  at  least  from  the  outside — 
the  fact  of  the  world's  thought  unified,  inter-re- 
lated, and  organized  into  one  complete  system,  and 
of  one  man's  unshaken  belief  in  such  a  system. 
That  was  a  new  strange  lesson  for  the  pragmatic 
Professor,  probably  not  obtainable  at  Berlin  or  at 
Harvard.     To  be  sure,  James  the  pluralist,  prag- 
matist,   theoretical  opportunist,   fought,   ridiculed, 
satirized  all  such  systematic  unity  of  Mind  and 
"World,  but  he  must  have  been  convinced  by  the 
weakness  of  his  own  arguments,  for  he  wound  up 
his  life  trying  to  build  some  such  a  system  of  his 
own,  which  he  actually  calls  "my  system"  in  what 
seems  almost  his  last-voiced  breath. 

There  is  no  doubt,  however,  that  James  had  good 
reason  to  be  puzzled  at  the  Concord  phenomenon. 
He  had  studied  at  Berlin,  home  of  Hegel  and 
Hegelism,  whose  decadence  in  that  city  he  saw  to 
be  complete.  He  declares  that  he  could  find  there 
"but  a  single  youthful  disciple"  among  the  vast 
horde  of  Professors  and  Tutors  in  the  great  Berlin 
University.  For  young  Germany  Hegel  was  dead 
and  buried  out  of  sight;  only  some  very  old  Pro- 
fessors still  lingered  pathetically  over  the  grave 
of  their  once  triumphant  Philosophy.  One  of  these 
antediluvian  Hegelians  I  saw  at  Berlin  during  my 


PSYCHOLOGY  APPEARS  AT  CONCORD.        337 

visit  there  in  1878 — the  aged  Michelet,  co-editor 
of  Hegel's  Works.  The  then  recent  German  Em- 
pire he  could  still  deduce  philosophically,  employ- 
ing the  Hegelian  categories.  In  spite  of  my  sym- 
pathy with  him  and  his  cause,  he  impressed  me  as 
reminiscence  mid  ruins. 

But  think  of  the  young  ambitious  student,  Wil- 
liam James,  returning  from  Germany  laden  with 
its  latest  erudition;   suddenly  he   finds   that   the 
main  article  of  philosophic    equipment,    as    here 
called  for,  has  been  omitted  from  his  Berlin  studies. 
Just  outside  of  Boston,  in  the  illustrious  town  of 
Concord  a  new  School    of    Philosophy    has    been 
started,  and  its  strongest  man  is  a  follower  of  He- 
gel.   And  what  is  most  confounding,  a  fresh  philo- 
sophic stream  appears  to  be  setting  in  from  the 
West,  that  wild  West  of  which  the  right  hero  was 
supposed  to  be  Buffalo  Bill,  whose  big  show  of 
savagery  was  trumpeted  as  the  true  university  of 
the  backwoods.     But  now  the  most  abstract  of  all 
abstract    Philosophies    comes    driving   Bostonward 
not  from  Berlin  but  from  St.  Louis.     Can  we  won- 
der at  the  perplexity,  the  pragmatism,  and  the  iron- 
ical pique  of  Professor  James?    That  was  enough 
to  make  all  New  England  turn  pragmatist. 

Still  let  it  be  strongly  affirmed  once  more  that 
James  brought  to  the  fore  the  cardinal  discipline 
of  the  age — Psychology.  Concord  did  not,  could 
not  do  that,  Such  remains  his  supreme  achieve- 
ment, and  a  great  one  it  is,  even  if  he  had  a  final 
relapse  to  Philosophy,  rebounding  between  his  two 


338    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

antitheses  again  and  again.  Nor  must  we  forget 
the  conclusion;  the  system-destroyer  seeks  by  a 
last  effort  to  become  the  system-builder,  very  prop- 
erly of  his  own  fragmentary  work.  Pathetic  is 
what  stands  printed  as  his  parting  testamentary 
utterance:  "Say  that  I  hoped  by  it  (his  last  un- 
finished book)  to  round  out  my  system  which  now 
is  too  much  like  an  arch  built  only  on  one  side." 

IX 

Finale  at  St.  Louis 

Shall  I  go  or  stay?  Has  the  moment  come  for 
me  to  quit  St.  Louis  the  disillusioned,  and  follow 
my  fleeing  comrades?  Let  the  reader  imagine  me 
propounding  such  questions  to  myself  as  I  sit 
lonely  in  my  room  after  my  return  from  Concord, 
about  the  first  of  September,  1883,  when  the  season 
of  renewed  study  is  soon  to  open  for  the  coming 
year.  Before  me  lies  a  copy  of  Goethe's  Faust, 
much  thumbed  and  bescribbled  round  the  margins 
with  notes,  signifying  at  least  a  considerable 
amount  of  reading  and  meditation.  During  the 
past  years  I  never  once  took  a  class  in  Faust,  still 
I  have  devoted  to  it  many  odd  moments  and  not 
a  few  moments  that  were  not  odd,  but  stolen  from 
other  less  attractive  duties.  For  somehow  this 
poem  has  recently  kept  overflowing  me  like  a  deluge 
from  unknown  sources,  giving  me  no  peace  till  I 
might  be  able  to  master  it  and  co-ordinate  it  with 


FINALE  AT  ST.  LOUIS.  339 

the  other  great  poems  which  I  have  been  working 
at,  especially  Homer  and  Shakespeare. 

Chiefly  through  the  Concord  School  and  its  ad- 
vertising power  my  name  has  been  scattered  very 
thinly  indeed  over  a  considerable  newspaper  sur- 
face, and  some  notion  of  my  line  of  effort  has  been 
planted  in  a  few  congenial  minds  on  divers  spots 
east  and  west.  The  result  is  a  number  of  localities 
outside  of  St.  Louis  have  requested  my  presence 
for  similar  courses.  Shall  I  accept  ?  But  whenever 
I  think  of  saying  Yes,  as  I  do  repeatedly,  that 
Faust-book  lying  before  me  seems  to  bristle  up  its 
leaves  like  a  hedgehog,  and  take  visible  human 
shape,  looking  an  emphatic  if  not  angry  No  into 
my  very  heart,  and  reaffirming  with  decision  my 
new  task. 

Still  the  doubt  will  flutter  up  again.  There  is 
in  the  first  place  the  economic  problem,  my  own 
little  personal  one  and  a  larger,  for  I  have  to  sup- 
port and  educate  my  child,  now  rapidly  growing 
into  her  earliest  teens.  Then  the  unimproved  Real 
Estate  in  North  St.  Louis,  the  millstone  tied  around 
my  neck  by  the  Great  Illusion  some  fifteen  years 
since,  not  only  refuses  to  budge  in  value  but  keeps 
sinking  lower  and  lower,  and  also  dragging  me 
down  deeper  into  its  mudhole  with  an  ever  fresh 
burden  of  taxes,  general  and  special.  Now  and 
then  I  mount  a  street  car  for  that  part  of  town, 
and  take  a  brief  look  at  myself  reflected  in  my  mir- 
roring pond  with  a  kind  of  self-pity,  to  which  the 


340    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

ripples  murmur  in  scoffing  smiles:  "Are  you  not 
yet  disillusioned  of  the  Future  Great  City  of  the 
World?    Well,  more  discipline  awaits  you." 

The    recompense,    however,    was    not    wanting. 
Classes    reported    as    usual,  with  one  striking  ex- 
ception, and  a  modest  living  rose  in  sight,  very 
modest   and  shrinking  but  still   adequate.      So   I 
braced  myself  to  the  emergency.      Only    in    one 
quarter  was  there  a  gap  and  that  was  at  the  cen- 
ter.    The  Kinder gartners  gave  no  sign  of  resum- 
ing their  work  under  my  tuition.     The  previous 
season  had  ended  in  a  discord,  as  the  reader  may 
recollect,  and  I  had  come  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  movement  in  that  direction  had  been  perma- 
nently blocked.     For  I  knew  Miss  Blow  to  be  in 
a  state  of  reaction  against  me  and  my  tendencies; 
nevertheless,  though  she  more  than  any  other  per- 
son held  the  intellectual    leadership    among    the 
city's  best,  I  made  up  my  mind  to  go  my  ways 
without  her  assistance,  and  even  under  her  frown 
if  need  be,  at  least  for  a  year.     The  Faust  poem 
would  not  loose  its  hold  of  me ;  I  had  won  new  in- 
sights, as  I  believed,  into  its  structure  and  mean- 
ing, but  they  were  still  scattered,  unfinished,  lying 
around  in  my  brain  disorganized ;  I  needed  a  whole 
season  to  work  it  over  in  private  and  in  class,  and 
thereby  make  it  my  own,  elevating  it  into  my  con- 
ception of  a  Literary  Bible.    This  I  could  best  do 
while  teaching  it;  and  already  I  had  succeeded  in 
forming  two  little  groups  in  Faust,  one  of  men 
and  the  other  of  women.     Thus  I  had  started  my 


FINALE  AT  ST.  LOUIS.  341 

special  present  task  of  Super-education,  now  more 
imperious  over  me  than  ever  before. 

Accordingly  I  resolved  to  make  this  my  Faust- 
year  (1883-4),  in  response  to  an  irresistible  inner 
demand  of  my  whole  selfhood.  I  had  found  that 
Faust's  spiritual  career,  as  set  forth  by  the  poet 
passed  through  a  great  Classical  Renascence,  espe- 
cially in  the  Second  Part  of  the  drama.  Thus  there 
was  revealed  a  bond  of  intimate  personal  expe- 
rience which  companioned  me  with  the  poem  at  the 
very  shrine  of  the  spirit.  To  live  this  fact  in  the 
form  which  is  given  it  by  the  poet  had  become  with 
me  not  merely  an  ambition  or  desire,  but  the  soul's 
hallowing  redemption. 

And  now  it  behooves  me  to  take  note  of  another 
significant  coincidence,  external  perchance,  yet  of 
great  influence  over  my  choice.  Let  me  state  it 
thus:  Faust,  on  the  whole,  may  well  be  deemed 
the  distinctive  poem  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement — 
the  favorite  poem,  more  read  and  more  bespoken 
than  any  other.  Never  since  then  has  any  great 
work  of  genius  taken  such  deep  and  persistent  pos- 
session of  the  city's  mind.  I  do  not  say  that  every 
person  in  our  midst  rushed  to  studying  Faust; 
still  within  my  range  there  was  more  discussion 
of  it  than  of  any  other  poetic  masterpiece.  It 
seemed  for  a  while  to  express  our  very  conscious- 
ness. Let  us  recall  that  this  took  place  during  the 
German  Era  of  St.  Louis,  as  I  have  labeled  it  in 
a  former  chapter.  The  great  Teutonic  poem  we 
adopted  as  our  own  in  accord  with  the  urban  char- 


342    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

acter  of  the  time,  or  possibly  in  response  to  the 
world's  chief  trend,  which  was  then  German,  or  at 
least  Germanizing. 

No  less  than  four  eminent  and  gifted  expound- 
ers had  held  classes  and  given  lecture  courses  on 
Faust  in  English  during  the  fore-mentioned  pe- 
riod, each  according  to  his  viewpoint,  and  native 
ability.  Davidson  fell  into  line,  and  expressed  his 
varying  opinions  upon  the  subject,  whch  were 
mainly  critical,  though  he  was  then  not  so  hostile 
to  Goethe  as  he  became  later.  He  was  at  that  time 
reveling  in  his  German  ecstasy  with  the  rest  of 
us,  rather  more  raptured  perhaps  than  the  rest  of 
us,  from  which  exuberance  he  afterward  had  a  vio- 
lent rebound  to  the  opposite.  Soldan  was  the  leader 
of  coteries  studying  Faust  which  were  composed 
of  the  first  ladies  of  the  town  mostly  living  on 
Lucas  Place,  then  aristocracy's  quarter.  Soldan 
may  have  been  selected  by  this  high-toned  set  be- 
cause he  was  the  politest  man  of  us  all,  and  like- 
wise well  versed  in  the  German  erudition  of  the 
subject,  having  been  born  and  educated  in  Ger- 
many. Dr.  Harris,  most  influential  of  our  whole 
set,  gave  frequent  talks  on  Faust  and  scattered 
many  allusions  to  the  work  even  through  his  more 
cryptic  discourses.  His  influence  carried  the  study 
among  the  more  aspiring  teachers  of  the  Public 
Schools,  and  put  stress  upon  its  relation  to  phi- 
losophy. The  poem  as  a  whole  he  did  not  seem 
to  care  for  or  even  to  seek  after;  certain  favorite 
passages  and  incidents  he  would  pick  out  and  dilate 


FINALE  AT  ST.  LOUIS.  343 

upon  with  a  special  relish.  Thus  each  of  these 
men  in  his  own  way  and  sphere  kept  the  great  mas- 
terpiece alive  and  working  for  years. 

Still  they  were  not  the  first  in  origination  or  in 
originality.  A  course  of  conversations  on  Faust 
given  by  Brockmeyer  during  the  year  1864,  at  a 
time  before  I  knew  him,  is  set  down  as  the  historic 
starting-point  of  the  St.  Louis  interest  in  the  poem. 
Harris  engineered  the  matter  and  got  together  the 
little  audience.  So  I  have  heard  from  him  the  story. 
Moreover  he  induced  Brockmeyer  to  commit  to 
writing  his  exposition  in  the  form  of  letters  which 
were  afterwards  published  in  the  first  numbers 
of  the  Journal  of  Speculative  Philosophy,  the  earli- 
est original  writ  begotten  of  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment. A  couple  of  these  Letters  on  Faust  in  manu- 
script I  heard  the  author  read  at  the  house  of  Har- 
ris on  my  first  visit  to  the  philosophic  group  in 
1865.  I  hardly  caught  their  bearing  at  the  start, 
but  gradually  through  them  and  the  discussions 
generated  about  them,  there  began  to  dawn  upon 
me  the  grand  new  field  of  the  literary  interpreta- 
tion of  the  greatest  masterpieces. 

In  fact,  Faust  was  Brockmeyer 's  one  poem,  the 
only  one  for  him  and  the  sovereign  over  all  others. 
He  would  recognize  Homer  and  Shakespeare,  still 
he  did  not  know  them  as  wholes,  but  merely  in 
salient  points  or  episodes  here  and  there.  People 
have  said  that  he  in  one  of  his  high  tantrums  could 
look  Mephistopheles  better  than  any  actor;  a  cer- 
tain demonic  impression  lay  in  his  grimace,  and 


344    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

roused  sometimes  a  little  tremor,  especially  in 
women,  and  even  antipathy.  I  have  often  tried  to 
identify  his  life  with  the  career  of  Faust ;  his  flight 
to  the  backwoods  was  his  grand  act  of  negation 
by  which  he  would  do  away  with  society  and  state. 
In  this  way  he  had  lived  the  poem,  and  so  he  be- 
came for  us  its  creative  expositor. 

Still  here  too  he  manifested  that  same  lack  of 
realizing  power,  which  has  before  been  noted  of 
him ;  after  making  a  fair  start  he  utterly  refused 
to  complete  his  grandly  conceived  work,  leaving  it 
a  wonderfully  promising  but  unfinished  chaos. 
Thus  his  Letters  on  Faust  remain  an  unrealized 
fragment,  one  of  his  numerous  much-bestrown 
torsos.  Still  they  showed  a  marvelous  gift  of  start- 
ing a  spiritual  fermentation  in  individuals,  and 
even  in  the  community;  but  they  remained  yeast, 
and  never  became  bread.  Similar  was  the  case  with 
his  single  supreme  philosophic  labor  over  Hegel's 
Logic,  indeed  with  his  whole  life.  His  genius  per- 
sisted in  staying  germinal,  never  unfolding  into 
fulfillment. 

I  have  now  to  ask  the  question:  why  should  St. 
Louis  or  a  goodly  proportion  of  her  thinking  peo- 
ple adopt  this  poem  as  a  kind  of  spiritual  breviary, 
as  an  ideal  reflector  of  their  very  soul-world,  mak- 
ing such  a  book  unconsciously  into  a  sort  of  Lit- 
erary Bible?  Let  it  be  premised  that  Faust  pro- 
claims at  the  start  the  great  negation  of  the  age, 
the  denial  of  all  truth  or  at  least  of  men's  ability 
to  know  truth.     The  course  of  the  poem  shows  a 


FINALE  AT  ST.  LOUIS.  345 

human  soul  laboring  through  life's  experiences 
under  the  burden  of  such  a  denial,  verily  the  new 
Fall  of  Man  which  took  place  not  six  thousand 
years  ago,  but  just  to-day  and  here.  Goethe's 
masterpiece  indicates  also  the  redemption  of  this 
last  fallen  Adam,  at  least  as  conceived  by  the 
poet.  Manifestly  if  we  cannot  know  the  true, 
or  if  what  seems  such,  is  only  a  mirage,  a  lie, 
then  we  live  in  a  world  of  Illusion,  of  Untruth, 
like  that  of  Faust,  when  he  preaches  his  first 
soliloquy.  Now  let  us  seize  the  connecting 
link:  St.  Louis,  during  these  her  Faust-years,  was 
engrossed  in  her  Great  Illusion,  as  already  nar- 
rated; her  fatuity  was  to  believe  in  a  phantasm, 
a  lying  appearance  conjured  up  for  the  time ;  yet 
she  could  not  help  wrestling  far  down  in  her  un- 
conscious depths  with  her  own  unreality,  with  her 
negation,  with  her  falsehood.  And  just  that  is 
the  grand  agony  of  Faust,  his  ever-recurring  inner 
battle  between  his  denial  of  truth  and  his  deeper 
aspiration  for  truth.  He  believed  in  the  Illusion, 
yet  fought  it,  had  to  fight  it  unto  the  death.  Thus 
for  her  deepest  self-expression,  yea  for  her  hope 
of  ultimate  salvation  St.  Louis  adopted  as  her  own 
this  world-poem  of  Goethe,  which  thereby  became 
her  truly  modern  and  remedial  literary  Gospel,  at 
least  while  she  lay  under  her  illusory  spell. 

Here  is  to  be  added  the  fact  that  this  writ 
bloomed,  not  a  native  product  of  our  city,  but  was 
transplanted  from  Germany,  who  had  begotten  it 
out  of  her  deepest  consciousness,  and  who,  as  we 


346    THE  ST.  L0UI8  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

see  to-day,  had  her  own  Great  Illusion,  of  which 
she  is  just  now  being  terribly  disillusioned.  Of  all 
this  vast  recent  experience  our  German  St.  Louis 
seems  now  but  a  small  far-off  presage.  "We  may 
well  think  that  time  has  written  a  vivid  new  com- 
mentary on  Faust,  revealing  it  mightily  as  the 
supreme  poem  of  Negation  negated,  or  more  con- 
cretely worded,  of  the  Great  Illusion  disillusioned. 
These  four  expositors  of  the  one  poem,  all  of 
them  men  of  mark  in  the  community,  had  created 
for  years  a  Faust  atmosphere,  of  which  I  took 
deep  inspirations,  though  I  had  never  felt  myself 
competent  to  unfold  a  distinctive  standpoint  of  my 
own  upon  this  subject.  But  some  time  during  this 
period,  just  when  I  do  not  know,  but  say  about 
1882-3,  I  felt  goaded  to  take  Faust  creatively  in 
hand,  and  to  re-read  it  with  the  time's  stress,  and 
with  a  great  fresh  discontent  at  what  I  had  pre- 
viously accepted  by  way  of  interpretation.  Espe- 
cially Brockmeyer's  Letters  no  longer  satisfied  me, 
though  they  were  my  first  germinal  stimulus  to  a 
deeper  view  of  this  work  and  of  all  Literature. 
But  I  found  that  I  must  run  new  lines  of  organi- 
zation through  the  whole  poem,  and  construe  its 
meaning  afresh,  even  if  a  number  of  suggestions 
belonging  to  my  old  teacher  I  preserved  and  devel- 
oped. Especially  in  my  Greek  journey,  I  had  after 
my  mental  build  re-enacted  the  deed  of  Faust  in 
pursuit  of  Helen,  which  is  the  central  theme  of  the 
Second  Part  of  the  drama.  Thus  I  saw  my  Rena- 
scence poetized  before  my  mind's  eye,  and  felt  an 


FINALE  AT  ST.  LOUIS.  347 

epoch  of  my  life  expressed  as  nowhere  else.  Against 
all  critical  opinion  I  came  to  prefer  the  Second 
Part  of  Faust  to  the  First  Part,  on  account  of  this 
personal  appeal  through  experience. 

The  year's  campaign  had  fairly  begun,  when  one 
day  a  missive  was  put  into  my  hands  with  the  fol- 
lowing purport:  "I  have  heard  of  your  Faust 
work.  Please  call  at  my  home  to  talk  the  matter 
over  for  a  Kindergarten  class."  Signed  by  Miss 
Blow.  The  request  was  a  surprise,  and  I  confess 
for  me  a  glad  surprise.  Of  course  I  obeyed  the 
summons,  the  arrangement  was  made,  and  the  les- 
sons started.  But  there  was  not,  and  could  not 
be  the  same  enthusiasm  and  mutual  sympathy  as 
in  former  years.  Miss  Blow  felt  and  rightly  felt 
that  I  was  developing  on  an  independent  line  in 
the  St.  Louis  Movement,  a  line  quite  distinct  from 
that  of  Dr.  Harris,  whose  word  was  her  infallible 
evangel.  Such  a  presence  as  mine  she  deemed  dan- 
gerous if  not  heretical.  Now  it  lay  in  her  deepest 
spirit  to  subordinate,  yea  to  suppress  even  with 
some  show  of  force  individual  tendencies  which  did 
not  square  with  her  views  or  with  those  of  her 
sponsors,  for  on  this  side  she  was  traditional  to  the 
core.  With  all  her  strength,  and  to  my  mind  she 
was  the  strongest  personality  of  us  left  in  the  city, 
she  had  the  autocratic  weakness  which  is  certain  t' 
show  itself  in  due  season.  I  could  not  help  some- 
times thinking  that  nature  had  interwoven  in  her 
iron-willed  character  a  strain  of  the  Spanish  in- 
quisitor.    In  the  absence  of  our  leaders  who  had 


348    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

taken  flight,  she  was  through  her  unquestioned 
talent  as  well  as  her  social  prestige,  the  literary 
potentate  of  our  St.  Louis  Movement.  Anyhow, 
I  was  not. 

Still  I  had  my  lasting  reward  in  a  fresh  com- 
munion with  the  spirit  of  those  Kindergarten  young 
ladies,  who  were  training  for  their  tasks  in  life. 
They  brought  to  their  calling  a  consecration  which 
no  money,  no  salary,  no  fame,  could  possibly  pro- 
cure or  pay  for,  but  might  destroy.  In  them  I 
could  see  a  telling  example  of  my  own  Super-voca- 
tion, to  my  unalloyed  edification  and  delight.  So 
deeply  was  I  impressed  with  their  missionary  spirit 
that  I  began  to  re-construct  in  consonance  with 
my  present  Classic  Renascence,  an  old  Greek  leg- 
end, that  of  Iphigenia,  in  order  to  embody  their 
deed  and  its  godlikeness  in  a  poetic  form  for  my 
own  better  contemplation  and  self-expression.  This 
work  grew  to  be  my  Agamemnon's  Daughter. 

The  class  ran  on  through  its  season  with  occa- 
sional little  seesaws  between  my  views  and  those 
of  Miss  Blow,  who  sometimes  showed  her  disre- 
gard or  possibly  her  protest  by  absenting  herself, 
which  she  had  never  done  before.  To  be  sure,  by 
way  of  excuse,  reports  of  her  private  troubles 
were  flying  in  the  air.  Finally  the  last  lesson 
came  with  a  kind  of  relief  all  around.  She  made 
her  appearance  in  her  front  chair  of  state,  and  the 
result  was  the  worst  explosion  of  the  year.  In 
the  Fifth  Act  of  the  Second  Part  of  Faust  occurs 
the  sad  episode  of  the  aged  pair,  Philemon  and 


FINALE  AT  ST.  LOUIS.  349 

Baucis,  which  I  interpreted  as  the  tragedy  of 
Civilization  whose  remorseless  advance  assails 
and  often  overwhelms  ancient  and  revered  land- 
marks of  the  past,  here  represented  by  the  old 
hut  and  the  old  church  of  the  old  couple.  Thus 
the  transmitted  world,  both  secular  and  religious, 
kept  vanishing  or  indeed  burning  up  to  make  way 
for  the  new  incoming  order  of  the  ever-evolving 
Faust.  Sacred  Tradition  may  become  tragic — with 
which  words  I  dared  throw  an  eye-bolt  at  Miss 
Blow,  behind  which  every  glance  in  that  class  fell 
into  line  and  shot  to  the  same  center.  That  was 
the  signal  for  the  denouement — the  blazing  fire- 
brand flung  into  the  full-charged  magazine. 

For  at  this  point  Miss  Blow  turned  on  me  and 
broke  out  into  decided  passionate  exception  to  what 
I  had  said,  since  she  grew  redder  and  louder  with 
every  word.  She  whipped  the  air  with  her  pointed 
index,  her  face  almost  boiled,  and  her  voice  was 
at  times  pitched  to  a  height  which  made  it  grate 
screechy.  She  seemed  to  feel  that  my  interpreta- 
tion was  a  personal  attack,  though  I  said  nothing 
of  the  sort,  whatever  I  may  have  looked.  To  be 
sure  she  had  the  right  to  apply  my  general  remark 
to  herself,  if  she  chose;  she  certainly  was  in  all 
honesty  a  prescriptive  soul  and  clung  to  tradition 
as  was  her  right;  report  ran  that  she  thought  of 
going  back  to  that  aged,  revered  church  which 
Faust  had  here  destroyed,  and  of  which,  she  gave 
a  hot  defence  against  its  destroyer,  and  me,  I  sup- 
pose. 


350    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

I  could  do  nothing  but  let  the  storm  spend  itself 
without  reply.  When  the  end  came  I  simply  said : 
"The  lesson  now  closes,  and  with  it  the  season, 
and  also  myself."  I  went  up  to  Miss  Blow  in  the 
presence  of  all,  and  extended  my  hand,  which  she 
took  with  a  smile,  sardonic  I  thought.  Such  was 
the  conclusion;  I  never  had  another  class  under 
her  guidance.  But  the  Kindergarten  itself  did 
not  and  would  not  quit  me,  nor  I  it.  In  fact,  its 
attachment  to  me  and  my  work,  as  well  as  my 
attachment  to  it  and  its  work  had  now  only  begun 
their  long  mutual  devotion  and  service  running 
into  the  decades.  Still  from  Miss  Blow  and  her 
class  this  most  fruitful  and  enduring  life-line  of 
mine  took  its  start. 

X 

Finale  at  Concord 

Landed  at  Concord  once  more,  summer  of  1885, 
and  taken  lodgment  at  the  hotel,  I  slipped  off  to 
the  village  barber  for  needed  service.  He  recog- 
nized me  as  I  entered  and  stretched  myself  out  in 
his  chair,  and  then  he  proceeded  to  welcome  me 
with  the  following  salutation:  "Well,  at  last  they 
have  caught  one  of  your  St.  Louis  philosophers ;  I 
hear  that  he  is  working  for  his  board  over  yonder 
in  the  Penitentiary.  Whose  turn  will  it  be  next?" 
Whereat  he  gave  a  smart  chuckle,  to  which  I  re- 
sponded in  a  brief  teehee,  for  I  knew  well  what 
he  was  talking  about,  and  indeed,  since  I  had  sized 
the  man  before,  I  expected  some  such  greeting  when 


FINALE  AT  CONCORD.  351 

I  stepped  into  his  shop.  I  gave  him  a  little  tit- 
for-tat  in  the  remark:  "Yes,  I  have  come  back 
to  you  here  to  let  you  try  your  hand  in  catching 
another  sleek  philosopher. ' ' 

The  foregoing  allusions  pertained  to  an  actual 
new  scene  in  the  Concord  drama,  namely,  the  ap- 
pearance of  the  villain  acting  his  part,  or  if  you 
prefer,  of  the  serpent  sneaking  into  our  little  philo- 
sophic Eden.  One  day  a  stranger  entered  the 
School,  paid  his  fee,  and  took  his  seat  on  the 
wooden  benches  of  Hillside  Chapel.  He  made  him- 
self remarked  as  an  intense  listener  to  all  the  deep 
discourses  there  given,  and  especially  did  he  seem 
to  look  up  from  his  front  seat  with  rapt  apprecia- 
tion into  the  face  of  Dr.  Harris,  as  the  latter 
would  elaborate  his  most  recondite  disquisitions  on 
Hegel's  Logic.  For  our  new-comer,  the  abstruser 
the  better,  and  after  the  lecture  he  would  go  for- 
ward and  ply  the  speaker  with  some  telling  ques- 
tion about  this  or  that  doctrine  of  the  discourse. 
He  also  played  the  jolly  good-fellow  to  members 
generally  at  the  boarding-house  and  the  hotel. 
Meanwhile  he  had  begun  to  ask  for  money  accom- 
modation in  personal  checks  of  small  amounts,  be- 
ing careful  to  redeem  his  obligation  the  next  day 
or  so.  Thus  it  went  on  for  perhaps  two  weeks, 
when  one  morning  the  ardent  philosopher  was  seen 
in  his  place  no  more. 

"Within  a  few  days  the  secret  was  out.  He  had 
succeeded  in  utilizing  the  good  name  he  had  so 
carefully  nursed  in  the  School,  in  the  town,  and 


352    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

it  seems  in  the  adjacent  country,  so  that  he  was 
able  to  pass  fraudulent  paper  in  considerable  sums 
upon  confiding  people ;  the  total  amounted  to  nearly 
a  thousand  dollars,  according  to  the  statement  of 
Mr.  Emery,  the  School's  Director,  in  a  note  to  me 
personally.  It  so  happened  that  I  was  not  present 
during  this  session,  hence  I  did  not  know  the  man. 
My  escape  was  narrow,  for  I  was  gullible  enough, 
especially  by  a  philosopher.  Still  I  got  a  little 
involved  in  the  case  through  an  accident.  The 
scoundrel  had  decamped  for  unknown  parts  in 
good  time;  particularly  he  had  left  the  town  bank 
at  Concord  in  the  lurch,  and  its  cashier  was  in- 
clined to  fall  back  upon  the  officers  of  the  School 
as  responsible,  which  they  contested.  The  right 
in  the  matter  I  do  not  know ;  but  the  result  was  a 
great  uproar  in  quiet  Concord,  with  charges  and 
countercharges  buzzing  through  the  air  and  sting- 
ing everywhither  at  random  like  maddened  hor- 
nets, but  winding  up  with  the  universal  execration 
of  the  School  of  Philosophy  which  had  lured  such 
an  infernal  serpent  into  that  innocent  paradise. 
Still  the  daring  scamp  who  could  counterfeit  Phi- 
losophy herself  right  in  her  sacred  temple,  and 
coin  his  fraud  into  dollars,  had  to  be  caught  and 
punished;  else  what  becomes  of  us  and  our  new- 
born Academe  in  a  naughty  world? 

News  of  the  catastrophe,  and  such  it  seemed  to 
be  for  a  little  while,  had  traveled  to  me  in  St. 
Louis  through  various  channels  when  I  received 
by  mail  from  Emery    a    peculiar    request.     Our 


FINALE  AT  CONCORD.  353 

Satanic  philosopher  had  been  traced  to  a  small 
medical  college  at  St.  Louis  (of  which  institution 
by  the  way  I  had  never  heard),  and  was  suspected 
of  playing  the  same  trick  there  which  he  had 
worked  so  successfully  at  Concord.  "Will  you  ask 
to  accompany  you, ' '  wrote  my  Concord  correspond- 
ent, "Madam  Soso  of  your  city,  who  was  here  at 
the  School  last  summer,  that  she  may  identify  the 
man  at  the  Medical  College  ? ' '  Detectives  were  also 
to  be  sent  by  the  Chief  of  Police,  whom  I  had  to 
visit  for  the  purpose — my  first  errand  of  that  kind 
in  my  life.  I  did  not  relish  the  job,  but  concluded 
I  must  sacrifice  my  little  disinclination  to  the  great 
cause  of  Philosophy  now  in  sore  trouble.  The  lady 
designated  was  a  member  of  one  of  my  classes, 
and  so  I  with  letter  in  hand,  went  to  her  and  told 
her  the  new  duty  which  Providence  seemingly  had 
laid  upon  her,  perchance  for  her  greater  distinc- 
tion. Then  came  the  explosion:  "No,  no,  I  can- 
not; what  will  my  husband  say?  I  shall  never 
hear  the  last  of  it — was  I  really  sitting  with  jail- 
birds in  your  Concord  School  of  Philosophy? 
Never,  my  daughter  will  feel  disgraced,  ashamed 
of  her  mother. ' '  I  could  only  reply :  ' '  Wait  then ; 
I  shall  explore  again  to-morrow." 

Accordingly  I  went  once  more  to  consult  with 
the  Chief  of  Police.  I  found  that  the  suspect  was 
already  under  arrest  for  similar  offenses  in  a  num- 
ber of  places;  Concord  was  only  one  and  the  last 
of  his  victims.  Thus  our  Philosophy  which  had 
speculated  so  much  about  the  Negative,  was  quite 


354    THE  8T.L0VIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

upset  by  the  actual  incarnate  appearance  of  that 
Negative  in  its  very  home,  and  experienced  some- 
what of  its  doctrine  as  realized  in  a  living  person. 
And  the  town  barber  had  his  justification  when  he 
saluted  the  stranger  before  him  with  the  riddling 
query:   "Are  you  to  be  the  next?" 

Let  us  now  pass,  after  such  a  wayward  intro- 
duction, to  our  regular  Hillside  Chapel  where  is 
to  be  given  during  the  present  summer  (1885)  a 
course  of  lectures  and  discussions  whose  theme  is 
Goethe.  This  was  the  seventh  annual  session  of 
the  School,  which  now  began  to  show  a  deflection 
from  Philosophy  to  Literature.  The  Platonic 
strand  had  already  dropped  into  the  background; 
on  the  whole  it  had  pretty  well  spent  itself.  The 
Hegelian  strand  was  still  kept  up,  especialy  by  Dr. 
Harris;  but  it  too  had  seen  its  best  days  at  Con- 
cord; it  was  getting  a  little  monotonous  through 
repetition,  even  if  the  audience  changed  somewhat 
from  year  to  year.  I  think  Dr.  Harris  himself 
showed  more  zest  this  season  for  Goethe  than  for 
Hegel.  He  was  feeling  the  need  of  making  the 
transition  from  Great  Philosophy  to  Great  Lit- 
erature— a  change  which  appeared  to  lie  also  in 
the  time. 

Naturally  I  was  delighted  at  this  turn  in  the 
tendency  of  the  School;  I  flattered  myself  that  it 
seemed  to  be  going  my  way  of  itself,  without,  how- 
ever, renouncing  wholly  its  original  philosophic 
purpose.  I  was  overflowing  with  the  theme,  inas- 
much as  I  had  devoted  myself    to    the  study  of 


FINALE  AT  CONCORD.  355 

Goethe  exclusively  during  the  past  year.  Espe- 
cially the  two  masterpieces,  Faust  and  Wilhelm 
Meister  I  had  wrought  over  and  taught  over  and 
I  may  say  fought  over  several  times,  taking  not 
simply  a  cold  intellectual  interest  in  their  contents, 
but  bringing  my  total  selfhood  of  emotion,  will, 
and  intellect  to  the  examination  of  their  artistic 
values  as  well  as  of  their  spiritual  problems.  For 
Goethe  never  fails  to  call  up  opposition  in  the 
Anglo-Saxon  mind.  The  result  was  a  very  pro- 
nounced Literary  School  already  at  Concord,  as 
shown  both  by  the  papers  read  and  especially  by 
the  fruitful  discussions  afterward.  The  whole 
drift  of  the  work  struck  me  as  something  new  in 
scope  and  in  form.  I  now  believe  that  my  later 
idea  of  a  Literary  School  dawned  upon  me  during 
this  very  suggestive  session.  But  such  a  School  to 
be  intensively  effective,  should  be  limited  to  one 
week  and  concentrated  on  the  one  greatest  poet, 
and  mainly  upon  his  greatest  work. 

Moreover  this  was  my  last  season  at  Concord; 
in  fact,  I  have  not  seen  the  town  since.  I  had 
stayed  there  for  weeks  at  a  time  during  five  sum- 
mers, and  had  tried  to  imbibe  somewhat  of  the 
spirit  of  the  place  from  various  sources,  humble 
and  high.  Undoubtedly  it  had  an  inner  social 
sanctuary  which  I  never  reached,  and  which  was 
shut  to  the  School.  Still  I  caught  the  setting  of 
nature  for  Emerson,  and  had  partaken  somewhat 
of  his  life's  communal  environment — a  precious 
experience  of  America's    greatest    literary    man, 


356    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— FART  SECOND. 

whom  I  fain  would  understand  and  commemorate. 
The  Concord  School  had  devoted  a  session  of  lec- 
tures to  the  memory  of  Emerson  in  1884;  I  was 
present  and  took  part,  by  special  request  of  Dr. 
Harris,  in  the  discussions,  but  I  did  not  then  think 
myself  ready  to  give  a  course  upon  the  life  and 
work  of  the  great  man.  My  deeper  spiritual  inti- 
macy with  him  was  to  come  later  and  to  express 
itself  in  writ. 

Probably  this  series  of  discourses  on  Goethe,  if 
not  the  best,  is  the  best-known  of  all  the  labors  of 
the  Concord  School  during  its  entire  period.  The 
lectures  had  the  good-luck  to  be  printed  in  a  book 
under  the  editorial  supervision  of  Mr.  Sanborn. 
This  book  is  still  read  a  little  for  the  sake  of  the 
names  of  its  lecturers,  most  famous  of  whom  was 
Mrs.  Julia  Ward  Howe,  though  I  cannot  think  her 
contribution  to  have  been  the  best,  even  if  it  was 
so  acclaimed  at  the  time  by  W.  D.  Howells.  Here 
can  be  found  Dr.  Harris'  larger  study  of  Faust, 
excellent  in  style  and  thought  for  the  first  portion, 
not  so  good  for  the  last  half,  to  my  mind.  This 
peculiar  descent  toward  the  close,  instead  of  an 
ascent,  may  be  remarked  in  other  writings  of  Dr. 
Harris,  owing,  I  think,  to  his  method  of  composi- 
tion. 

Mr.  Thomas  Davidson,  with  that  canny  Scotch 
burr  of  his  on  the  tip  of  his  tongue,  was  present 
at  this  session  and  made  himself  an  enlivening 
center,  as  usual,  round  which  revolved  a  number 
of  ladies  and  a  couple  of  gentlemen.    That  was  his 


FINALE  AT  CONCORD.  357 

habit  somewhat;  he  did  not  and  could  not  seize 
the  intellectual  sovereignty    of    the    School,   but 
formed  a  little  coterie  of  his  own  off  to  one  side. 
I  had  last  seen  him  in  Rome  some  six  years  be- 
fore; he  was  then  in  strong  reaction  against  his 
old  St.  Louis  Teutonizing  tendency,  and  he  now 
was  in  no  friendly  mood  toward  German  Philos- 
ophy and  Literature.     Over  Hegel   especially  he 
could  almost  fall  into  an  access  of  frenzy,  and  he 
was  full  of  exceptions    against    Goethe,  some    of 
which  were  certainly  well  taken.    We  often  clashed 
in  the  discussions,  and  we  came  to  be  regarded  the 
two  chief  pugnacities  in  the  School;  whenever  he 
would  vent  one  of  his  polemical  diatribes,  a  num- 
ber of  eyes  would  at  once  roll  around  toward  me 
with  the  little  twinkle  of  a  laugh  as  if  to  sing: 
"Your  turn  now;  up,  sail  in."    This  I  usually  did, 
for  he  gave  opportunity  enough ;  in  fact,  my  opin- 
ion was  that  he  had  never  penetrated  to  the  inmost 
soul  of  the   great   poet,   whose    two   masterpieces, 
though  he  may  have  read  them  even  with  care,  he 
did  not  really  understand,  not  having  lived  with 
and  wrestled   with    them    and   thus   appropriated 
them  to  himself  in  a  spiritual  conquest  of  assimila- 
tion.    He  always  seemed    to    stand    outside   and 
above,  and  thence  to  criticize  them,  never  getting 
down  inside  and  reproducing  in  his  own  way  what 
he  found  there.     His  attitude  seemed  to  declare 
that  he  knew  them  better  than  they  did  themselves. 
Still  genial,  red-bearded,  hot-headed  Tom  David- 
son was  the  most  interesting  man  present,  not  the 


358    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

most  convincing — rather  the   opposite.     Brilliant, 
learned,    far-travelled,    still    you    could    not    help 
spotting  him   all   over  with   interrogation   marks. 
He  gaily  loved  paradox  excessive  just  to  see  the 
shock  it  made ;  and  he  could  riot  in  the  exploitation 
of  his  ingenuity  and  erudition,  simply  for  his  own 
dear  delighted  self's  sake.     And  yet  he  was  full 
of  kindnesses,  of  good  works,  also  of  genial  mildly 
bibulous  comradery ;  in  right  mood,  and  he  was  pre- 
eminently a  man  of  moods,  he  could  lift  up  and 
lavishly  praise  what  he  had    not    so    long  since 
damned  to  the  last  depths  of  the  Inferno.    I  may 
add  here  that  after  all  our  antagonisms  over  Faust 
and  everything  else,  he  suddenly  took  a  notion  to 
commend,  and  that  with  some  warmth  before  the 
whole  School,  my  lecture  on  Wilhelm  Meister  which 
I  gave  during  that  session.  Very  unexpected  of  him 
was  that  turn — a  feat  never  performed  by  him  be- 
fore or  repeated  by  him  afterwards,  as  far  as  my 
knowledge  now  prompts. 

A  small  biographic  item  I  permit  myself  here 
to  jot  down  for  those  who  may  be  interested,  since 
I  have  been  once  or  twice  asked  about  the  matter 
thus:  "Where  is  that  work  of  yours  on  Goethe's 
Wilhelm  Meister?"  Never  printed,  never  indeed 
finished  to  suit  my  test  of  literary  publication.  I 
had  classes  in  that  novel  and  gave  lectures  upon 
it,  and  wrote  many  pages  of  notes  with  infinite 
marginalia;  I  even  put  together  some  essays  on 
the  subject.  Still  somehow  it  would  never  organize 
itself  into  a  genuine  book  for  me,  but  it  persisted 


FINALE  AT  CONCORD.  359 

in  staying  more  or  less  frowsy,  disjoined,  recalci- 
trant to  any  pervasive  light-radiating  order.     In 
other  words,  it  would  never  get  itself  born  out  of 
its  second  embryonic  stage  into  its  third  organic 
self-integrating   form.      Harris    would   have   pub- 
lished the  fragments  in  his  Journal,  but  such  scraps 
offended  my  sight  in  print,  and  moreover  violated 
my  literary  conscience.    I  was  beset  by  some  fatal 
instinct  which  made  me  a  writer  of  books,  not  of 
magazine    articles,   which   now   hold  the   author's 
cash-box  and  blow  his  fame's  trumpet.    Off  and  on 
for  a  dozen  years  I  was  engaged  in  expounding 
and  otherwise  belaboring  this  book,  but  it  would 
not  come  forth  to  any  right  coherence.     So  I  now 
fumble  over  the  old  yellow    pile    of    manuscript 
showing  a  task  unfinished  and  unfinishable,  with  a 
kind  of  jaundiced  pathetic  look.     Let  it  sink  into 
the  time-waves  of  oblivion,  as  one  of  my  lost  books. 
On  a  fine  day  during  this  or  possibly  some  other 
summer,  I  felt  a  longing  to  run  over  to  Walden  and 
take  a  boat-ride  just  to  see  if  I  could  not  catch  one 
of  Thoreau's  fishes,  most  eternal  of  the  kind,  except- 
ing old  Jonah's.     I  asked  friend  Emery  to  be  my 
companion.    "We  shall  have  to  get  permission  from 
Farmer  Moore,"  says  he;  "the  pond  has  recently 
been   stocked,   strangers   are   not   allowed   to   fish 
there,  but  I,  as  a  resident,   can  obtain  a  permit 
from  the  guardian,  and  may  take  you  along."    So 
we  went  to  Farmer  Moore,  as  he  was  familiarly 
called,  who  was  next  neighbor  to  Alcott's  Orchard 
House,  and  whose  white  tidy  New  England  grange 


360    THE  ST- LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

stood  nearly  oposite  to  Emerson's  mansion.   "Who 
is  this  man?"  asked  the  bluff  heavy-handed  soil- 
tiller,  as  he  was  shoveling  compost  in  his  barnyard. 
"A  lecturer  at  our  School  from  St.  Louis."    "A 
philosopher,  eh?"    "Yes,  I  suppose  so."     "Well, 
I'll  give  you  a  permit  right    off,"    whereat    he 
clutched  a  piece  of  scratch-paper  and  scribbled. 
"Take  it ;  no  danger  ahead  I  see ;  philosophers  don't 
catch  any  fish."    I  made  answer,  which,  as  I  think 
it  over  now,  must  have  run  thus:    "Some  forty 
or  fifty  years  ago  you  had  two  philosophers  fishing 
in  Walden,  named  Emerson  and  Thoreau,  both  of 
them  once,  your  neighbors  over  younder  in  that 
house;  they  caught  the  biggest  string  of  fish  ever 
taken  from  this  or  any  similar  pond  on  this  globe, 
and  people  are  eating  of  that  catch  yet;  I  took  a 
meal  of  it  far  away  in  St.  Louis  only  a  few  weeks 
ago.     So  I  have  come  to  the  source,  for  I  would 
like  to  learn  the  same  trick."     "Take  your  per- 
mit," interrupted   Farmer  Moore,   turning  away 
to  business;  "but  leave  a  few  for  us."     "I   am 
going  to  bag  the  whole  thing,  if  I  can,  and  carry  it 
off  to  the  West,"  I  gasconaded  after  the  humorous 
husbandman  as  he  disappeared  through  his  barn- 
door. 

We  sauntered  along  the  path  to  Walden,  took 
a  boat  and  I  threw  in  my  line — not  a  nibble.  We 
tried  all  the  nooks  around  the  edges  of  the  pond, 
then  we  sought  its  center,  sounding  the  shallowest 
and  the  deepest  places — no  luck.  In  my  home- 
creek  I  knew  every  hole  where  the  suckers  lay, 


SOME  RESULTS.  361 

every  riffle  where  the  minnows  sported,  every  mill- 
dam  where  the  bull-pouts  nestled;  but  here  my 
boyhood's  skill  availed  not,  Emery  cried,  "I  have 
enough."  I  answered,  "Patience  is  now  our  School 
of  Philosophy — once  more."  But  blue-eyed  Wal- 
den  looked  again  her  silent  No,  and  we,  rejected 
and  dejected,  soon  turned  homeward.  As  we  ram- 
bled through  the  fields  we  moodily  philosophized: 
"A  prophetic  day?  We  certainly  can  catch  no 
fish  in  Walden;  yes,  Farmer  Moore  was  right." 

XI 

Some  Results 

The  Concord  School  of  Philosophy  considered 
itself,  according  to  the  statement  of  its  leaders  in 
various  public  utterances,  as  an  attempt  to  stem, 
by  a  revival  of  the  great  idealistic  thinkers  of  the 
past,  the  materialism  of  the  time.  This  world- 
view,  the  materialistic,  had  received  an  enormous 
impetus  from  the  works  of  Spencer,  Mill,  Darwin, 
Huxley,  and  had  won  its  chief  prestige  and  sup- 
port from  the  recent  triumphs  of  Natural  Science, 
which  was  in  these  years  exulting  in  a  sort  of 
universal  war-dance  of  victory  round  the  civilized 
globe,  having  pushed  itself  not  only  into  the  Uni- 
versities and  Colleges  of  most  countries,  but  also 
into  the  Common  Schools.  Many  of  its  contribu- 
tions to  education  were  valid  and  much  needed  ;  but 
as  usual  with  novelties,  it  claimed  too  much,  indeed 


362    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

all,  and  so  had  to  be  remanded  to  its  limits,  in 
which  it  is  still  alive  and  doing  its  indispensable 
part.  Here  we  may  remark  that  Natural  Science 
through  Physiology  seemed  to  pass  gradually  over 
into  Psychology  as  the  time's  new  educative  prin- 
ciple, of  which  transition  Professor  James  may  be 
deemed  the  chief  agent  in  our  land,  though  he  had 
many  co-workers. 

Confessedly,  then,  the  Philosophy  of  the  Con- 
cord School  was  derived  from  tradition,  from 
Europe,  and  made  no  claim  to  be  a  native  product 
of  the  country  or  of  the  time.  Indeed  it  was 
openly  reactionary  against  present  tendencies  in 
the  world  of  thought,  and  proposed  to  flee  back  for 
refuge  from  the  incoming  tide  to  systems  past  and 
distant,  if  not  transcended.  Now  this  was  the 
point  at  which  I  was  inclined  to  turn  aside,  not 
so  much  through  conscious  opposition  as  from  a 
fermenting  unconscious  doubt  concerning  the 
function  of  Philosophy  itself  in  our  new  social 
order.  To  be  sure  I  had  nothing  then  to  put  in 
its  stead,  I  only  felt  the  void  in  myself  without 
being  able  to  compass  it  or  even  distinctly  locate 
it.  So  I  veered  off  into  Great  Literature  as  my 
best  self-expression  for  the  time  instead  of  Great 
Philosophy,  and  began  to  interweave  the  Literary 
Bibles  into  the  Concord  School  just  at  the  start 
with  my  first  course  of  lectures  on  Shakespeare, 
followed  later  by  the  course  on  Homer. 

Now  the  curious  fact  comes  up  that  the  School 
itself  started  to  tilt  gradually  in  the  same  direc- 


SOME  RESULTS.  363 

tion.  As  already  recounted,  it  devoted  in  1885  the 
larger  and  more  exuberant  part  of  its  energy  and 
enthusiasm  to  Goethe,  upon  whose  different  works 
more  than  a  dozen  lecturers  discoursed,  bringing 
renewed  interest  and  refreshing  variety  into  the 
School.  That  was  a  great  step  forward,  or  it  might 
be  said,  aside  from  Philosophy,  though  the  latter 
was  not  by  any  means  abandoned.  And  the  next 
year  (1886)  one-half  the  time  of  the  School,  whose 
course  had  been  limited  to  a  fortnight,  was  to  be 
given  to  Dante.  I  was  not  present  at  Concord 
during  this  session,  but  I  had  transplanted  the 
work  to  the  "West,  where  I  was  nursing  into  exist- 
ence a  new  Literary  School  without  the  specially 
philosophic  department.  But  let  it  be  duly  re- 
marked that  the  Concord  School  of  Philosophy  in 
the  eight  years  of  its  active  life  hitherto,  had 
evolved,  quite  unintentionally  I  think,  a  line  of 
lecture  courses  or  of  spoken  commentaries  on  the 
four  Literary  Bibles,  elevating  them  to  an  equality 
with,  if  not  precedence  over  the  great  philosophic 
masters.  Such  an  evolution  of  the  School  I  need 
hardly  say,  gratified  me,  indeed  tallied  with  my 
own  personal  evolution,  and  I  took  it  as  a  sign 
of  the  time  and  of  myself,  since  it  seemed  to  be  a 
pointer  to  my  future  pathway. 

Thus  the  Concord  School,  starting  consciously 
with  Philosophy  had  unconsciously  developed  its 
first  unsupected  literary  germ  into  a  growth  even 
more  vigorous  than  itself,  being  younger  and  not 
so  dry.    iStill  it  must  not  be  forgotten  that  another 


364    TEE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

germ  much  smaller  and  more  embryonic  than 
this  literary  one  was  planted  in  the  Concord  School 
by  Professor  James,  namely,  that  of  Psychology. 
But  it  did  not  grow  perceptibly  in  the  School's 
mental  soil;  James  never  gave  another  course  at 
Concord,  and  nobody  else  on  that  subject,  so  that 
his  seed  did  not  sprout  there  as  far  as  I  could  dis- 
cern. Still  his  work  was  not  forgotten,  though  it 
took  longer  to  mature,  and  had  to  seek  a  different 
field  for  its  coming  harvest.  Hence  we  may  set 
down  this  to  have  been  a  chief  merit  of  the  Con- 
cord School,  that  it  attracted  to  itself  and  bore 
along  in  its  bosom  three  major  disciplines  of  spirit 
in  three  different  stages  of  their  evolution:  (1) 
Philosophy  as  evolved,  (2)  Literature  (in  its 
greatest  poets)  as  openly  evolving,  (3)  Psychology 
as  still  secretly  germinating  in  embryo. 

In  regard  to  the  external  success  of  the  enter- 
prise, that  will  be  viewed  variously  according  to 
the  viewer's  standard.  It  had  the  vitality  to  last 
ten  years,  during  which  time  some  2000  people 
attended  the  sessions  all  taken  together,  according 
to  Sanborn's  estimate.  The  regular  audience  ran 
from  forty  to  sixty  at  each  meeting,  though  a 
famous  lecturer  would  treble  these  numbers.  John 
Fiske  filled  the  Chapel  to  overflowing,  and  Emer- 
son once  compelled  the  managers  to  secure  a  larger 
hall,  though  he  then  often  enunciated  indistinctly, 
and  his  son  sat  at  his  side  to  help  him  over  the 
harder  words,  and  to  prompt  his  lapsing  memory. 
On  the  other  hand  I  saw  the  number  present  drop 


SOME  RESULTS.  365 

to  eight  for  Dr.  Harris  on  a  bad  night,  although 
he  generally  had  the  average  attendance  of  forty 
to  fifty  for  his  most  abstruse  philosophemes.  I 
believe,  too,  that  he,  of  all  the  lecturers,  had  per- 
sonally the  most  devoted  band  of  listeners.  As  to 
compensation  in  cash,  mine  was  not  enough  to 
pay  my  railroad  fare;  still  the  investment  was 
one  of  the  best  of  my  life.  Of  course  none  of  us 
received  any  adequate  pay  for  our  service,  except 
our  audience  possibly.  Sanborn,  the  treasurer, 
reports  that  after  all  the  expenses  for  the  ten  years 
had  been  met,  there  remained  less  than  a  dollar 
in  the  treasury,  which  he  pocketed,  evidently  with- 
out much  compunction,  for  he  smilingly  tells  on 
himself.  Dr.  Harris  would  have  shown  a  similar 
financial  balance,  if  he  had  left  any  exhibit  of  his 
outlay.  Still  every  participator  was  gratified,  I 
think,  by  the  result,  and  felt  that  his  time  and 
money  had  been  well  spent. 

As  to  myself,  I  hope  that  the  foregoing  pages, 
which  have  already  swollen  to  a  generosity  in 
numbers  far  beyond  my  original  frugal  plan,  will 
reflect  somewhat  of  the  exuberant  delight  and 
profit,  which  overflowed  me  quite  unexpectedly  I 
may  say,  from  the  School  and  its  varied  experi- 
ences, serious  and  humorous.  It  seemed  to  drop 
into  my  life  at  an  epochal  turn,  and  it  certainly 
had  an  important  part  in  shaping  my  future  career. 
I  am  not  certain  that  I  otherwise  would  or  could 
have  broken  away  from  my  confining  pinfold  in 
St.  Louis,  and  have    won    a    deliverance,  which 


366    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

meant  a  new  expansion  beyond  the  old  limits,  in- 
stead of  a  possible  shrinkage  back  into  the  trans- 
mitted humdrum  of  a  vocation  with  little  or  no 
relief  from  its  treadmill.  But  Concord  brought 
me  more  than  one  opportunity  to  push  out  else- 
where, and  to  show  myself  able  to  break  over  my 
local  limits  and  to  shake  off  their  fetters.  Then 
by  means  of  the  School  I  had  seen  and  heard  and 
conversed  with  a  larger  number  of  eminent  living 
men  than  ever  before  or  since.  Such  a  personal 
intercourse  had  its  special  training  for  me  who 
had  ever  preferred  to  commune  with  the  great 
souls  of  the  past  through  the  printed  page.  I  was 
already  too  much  inclined  to  flee  to  the  companion- 
ship of  the  makers  of  the  Literary  Bibles,  shun- 
ning my  lesser  pen-wielding  contemporaries  who 
had  still  the  disadvantage  of  being  able  to  draw 
breath.  More  alive  to  me  than  all  living  comrad- 
ery  was  the  dead.  From  this  point  of  view  my 
personal  experience  now  turned  to  a  kind  of 
green  oasis  in  the  foregone  world  of  disembodied 
spirits. 

Here  again  I  must  touch  upon  the  fact  that  the 
Concord  School  was  through  some  cause  or  other 
the  most  miraculous  dispenser  of  reputation  over 
the  whole  country  that  has  ever  crossed  my  life's 
orbit  up  to  present  date.  Indeed,  I  think  I  dare 
take  oath  that  the  only  time  when  the  crotchety  God- 
dess Fama  ever  smiled  upon  me  her  fleeting  favors 
was  in  that  little  Hillside  Chapel.  For  some  reason 
the  newspapers  showed  an  extraordinary  interest 


SOME  RESULTS.  367 

in  our  philosophic  experiment.  Two  reporters 
from  the  great  Boston  dailies  were  usually  present 
at  the  School,  and  one  of  them  at  least  was  quite 
a  philosopher,  who  used  to  make  little  metaphys- 
ical speeches,  besides  sending  very  full  reports, 
which  were  copied  in  part  or  paragraphed  all  over 
the  country.  I  think  this  publicity  was  mainly  due 
to  the  expert  skill  of  Sanborn,  who  was  a  journal- 
ist by  profession.  Of  course  there  must  have  been 
some  real  public  curiosity  about  the  matter.  Then 
Concord  and  its  Worthies  and  its  other  antiquities 
possessed  a  distinction  of  their  own,  even  to  the 
extent  of  having  a  guide-book  for  visitors.  But 
judge  of  my  surprise  when  a  complimentary  letter 
was  handed  me  by  the  mail  carrier  from  a  former 
critical  fellow-student  at  College  whom  I  had  not 
heard  of  for  twenty  years,  and  who  now  was  lo- 
cated in  the  everglades  of  Florida,  whither  my 
name  had  penetrated  to  him  in  print.  And  at  the 
hotel  one  day  who  should  slip  up  behind  me  and 
tap  me  on  the  shoulder  but  my  Athenian  compan- 
ion, the  fair  youth  whom  I  re-named  Narcissus,  as 
he  wandered  with  me  along  classic  streams  trying 
to  behold  the  antique  nymphs  but  seeing  only  him- 
self and  me.  I  had  left  him  behind  in  Hellas,  I 
thought,  to  woo  the  Greek  tongue ;  but  here  he  sud- 
denly turns  up  again  after  years,  having  tracked 
me  through  some  newspaper  notice,  and  at  once 
we  start  to  take  another  classic  promenade,  not  now 
along  the  waterless  Ilissus  but  the  full-flowing  Mus- 
ketaquid,  interwreathing  sighfully  remembrances 


368    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

of  fair  Praxilla,  Maid  of  Athens,  though  not  that 
far-sung  damsel  of  Byron. 

Still  the  most  stunning  windfall  of  propitious 
publicity  overwhelmed  me  with  a  rush  when  one 
Sunday  morning  I  opened  the  Boston  Herald,  and 
saw  several  columns  of  its  large  issue  headed  by 
my  name  in  big  black  letters.  It  was  an  extended 
notice  of  myself  and  of  the  three  or  four  books 
I  had  then  written,  with  a  very  friendly  account 
of  my  work  at  the  Concord  School.  Thus  I  felt 
myself  borne  along  Fameward  in  a  first  trip  on 
a  huge  paper  balloon  inscribed  with  my  name  leg- 
ible to  all  New  England,  from  which  authoritative 
source  it  percolated  in  a  few  driblets  to  my  home 
in  the  West.  But  let  the  main  result  be  at  once 
told:  through  invitations  from  sundry  places,  I 
found  myself  able  and  willing  to  quit  St.  Louis  and 
to  start  on  my  coming  career  of  dissemination. 

I  have  already  alluded  to  the  fact  that  the  Con- 
cord School  had  its  critics  and  still  more  decidedly 
its  caricaturists  and  satirists.  Though  expressly 
traditional,  it  nevertheless  offended  a  good  many 
dear  New  England  traditions,  for  which  offense  re- 
sentment could  hardly  help  speeding  its  venomed 
arrows.  The  established  order  in  Church,  School, 
University,  Literature  was  at  least  indirectly  chal- 
lenged, and  failed  not  to  hit  back  with  its  multi- 
farious missiles.  Then  human  psychology  would 
manifest  itself  practically  at  the  effrontery  of  that 
"Western  invasion  which  dared  foist  its  culture  and 
philosophy  and  literary  doctrine  upon  their  true 


SOME  RESULTS.  369 

home-land,  yea  upon  their  very  home-town  in  the 
East.  I  collected  quite  an  anthology  of  stinging 
epithets  flung  sometimes  at  me  in  person,  but 
oftener  heard  'round  the  hotel  corridors  and  on  the 
streets,  and  particularly  in  Boston.  But  who  would 
wish  to  resuscitate  these  little  biting  insects  after 
so  many  years  of  torpor?  So  I  sweep  them  out  of 
scrap  box  and  brain  into  the  fire.  Sanborn  at 
whom  chiefly  they  seemed  to  unsheathe  their 
weapons  as  the  prime  offender,  rather  enjoyed,  I 
think,  roiling  up  Boston  and  even  Concord  on  ac- 
count old  local  grudges  now  and  then  audible  but 
quite  unfathomable  to  the  outsider. 

St.  Louis  also  did  not  fail  to  furnish  keen  detrac- 
tors of  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  for  she  could  not 
help  being  herself,  and  giving  a  slap  to  her  own. 
And  they  have  not  yet  died  out  with  the  death  of 
the  semi-century  since  its  birth.  The  latest  history 
of  the  city,  published  only  a  few  years  ago,  inter 
sperses  mid  its  other  statistics  quite  an  itemized 
contempt,  lampooning  that  old  philosophic  folly 
and  its  gullible  gudgeons.  There  is  no  question  that 
philosophers  have  from  long  ago  been  objects  of 
ridicule  and  envy,  not  without  provocation.  In  an- 
cient Athens  we  all  have  read  how  that  supreme 
scoffer,  the  comic  poet  Aristophanes,  derided  the 
all-greatest  Socrates  and  his  movement,  and  how 
his  fellow-citizens  compelled  him,  in  his  old  age,  to 
drink  the  cup  of  hemlock  for  his  last  draught. 
Moreover,  the  charge  was  often  heard  in  antiquity 
that  the  folk  as  a  whole,  especially  the  Athenians, 


370    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

was  addicted  to  Envy,  suspecting  and  even  aveng- 
ing any  excellence  above  its  own  level.  Hence  that 
city  was  said  to  have  banished  its  Great  Men  by 
means  of  the  ostracism,  which,  however,  according 
to  Grote  and  others,  may  have  had  a  different  pur- 
pose. In  like  manner,  the  accusation  has  been  made 
that  St.  Louis  has  shown  a  decided  streak  of  that 
old  Athenian  trait  in  her  communal  character, 
being  endowed  with  more  than  her  share  of  civic 
Envy  (the  ancient  hag  Invidia),  and  hence  driv- 
ing away  her  eminent  men  by  a  subtle  but  effective 
ostracism. 

At  any  rate  the  Philistines  had  their  inning 
against  our  St.  Louis  Movement.  I  received  now  and 
then  an  unsigned  letter  which  caricatured  and 
abused,  but  never  threatened  me  with  an  infernal 
machine.  The  newspapers  had  their  little  spirts 
of  wit  usually  pumped  up  from  rather  dry  wells.  A 
long  editorial  in  a  Sunday  edition  of  a  leading  daily 
took  the  matter  seriously,  arguing  that  the  study  of 
Homer  and  the  old  Greeks  was  utterly  purposeless, 
if  not  injurious,  in  this  new  time  of  this  new  world 
of  ours,  and  advising  us  to  take  up  the  History  of 
Liberty  as  set  forth  in  Motley's  Dutch  Republic,  a 
book  then  much  in  vogue.  The  article  was  brought 
to  me  and  I  replied,  not  to  the  newspaper,  but  to 
the  bringer,  a  pupil  of  mine:  "Our  old  Greek 
Thucydides  contains  all  of  that  book  of  Motley's, 
good  as  it  is,  and  indeed  all  the  History  of  Europe 
up  to  date  in  its  embryonic  form,  if  you  only  read 
him  aright.    And  the  right  way  is  to  make  a  new 


SOME  RESULTS.  371 

translation  of  him,  not  merely  into  verbal  English, 
but  into  the  whole  historic  evolution  of  Europe  and 
America  till  now." 

Occasionally  the  philosophers  would  start  a  hum- 
orous bout  at  burlesquing  themselves  in  their  own 
ponderous  nomenclature. '    We  were  all  well  aware 
of  the  comic  possibilities  which  lay  in  our  speech, 
in  our  doctrine,  and  also  in  ourselves.     We  had  not 
read  the  Aristophanic  Clouds  in  vain,  and  we  failed 
not  to  enjoy  the  satirical  grotesquery  of  Dean  Swift 
and  Rabelais.    We  could  caricature  our  own  dear 
Hegel  in  a  kind  of  relief  from  the  oppressive  sever- 
ity of  his  hugely  organized  system,  and  for  the  mo- 
ment's   amusement    make    his    unwieldy    gigantic 
framework  trip  an  elephant  dance  on  a  pin-point. 
A  favorite  jest  was  the  Hegelian  definition  of  a  hole 
in  your  coat,  as  "the  partial  negation  of  the  totality 
of  the  being   on-and-around-itself  (des  an-und-um- 
sich  Seyns) . ' '    This  piece  of  badinage  tricked  out  in 
its  Hegelian  categories,  was,  if  I  remember  correct- 
ly, flung  scoffingly  at  us  in  one  of  our  meetings  by 
a  former  student  of  a  German  University,  where 
he  had  picked  it  up,  as  the  final  bomb  demolishing 
our  philosopher's  entire  Coliseum  of  the  Universe. 
But  the  best  known  skit  produced  by  the   St. 
Louis  Movement  in  burlesquing  itself  was  a  clever 
little  book,  which  was  published  under  the  name  of 
"  Our  Odyssey  Club,  by  Agnes  Gragg."    Its  scene 
is  pictured  from  a  Homer  Class,  and  it  satirizes  ,not 
in  a  wholly  unfriendly  way,  the  appearance,  doings, 
and  sayings  of  the  teacher,  to  whom  is  given  the 


372    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

highly  Teutonized  title  of  Professor  Wolfgang.  The 
ladies  in  attendance  are  set  off  with  bright  touches 
of  satirical  humor,  which  now  and  then  seem  sea- 
soned with  a  little  spice  of  feminine  malice,  adding 
a  piquant  flavor  to  the  style.  And  the  dressing 
talent  of  her  sex  there  present  is  not  wholly  neg- 
lected by  Agnes.  The  content  of  the  Homer  lesson 
is  generally,  though  not  always,  shaded  into  the 
mock-heroic,  something  which  happened  to  old 
Homer  himself  in  the  ancient  parody  called  "The 
Battle  of  the  Frogs  and  Mice."  The  sprightly 
travesty  was  received  with  a  whoop  of  applause  by 
the  newspaper  critics,  naturally  of  the  Mephisto- 
phelean strain,  and  I  read  in  a  Chicago  Literary 
Periodical  a  grave  article  which  deemed  the  book 
a  timely  antidote  against  a  very  dangerous  epi- 
demic in  Literature  then  raging  at  St.  Louis. 

I  would  not  omit  the  tender  touch,  since  through 
the  litle  book  sweetly  interweaves  a  little  novelette 
with  a  love  intrigue  whose  heroine  bears  the  name 
of  Rose  Duane,  of  a  very  red-rosy  look.  She  starts 
with  scoffing  at  Professor  Wolfgang's  views  and 
bemocks  the  man  himself  for  his  various  oddities  of 
dress  and  behavior.  But  somewhere  about  the  last 
lesson  he  fortunately  gets  his  leg  broken  in  a  rail- 
road accident,  whereupon  the  sarcastic  young  lady 
hastens  to  nurse  him  back  to  health.  Then  we 
hear  the  hapy  end:  "The  Odyssey  Club  had  done 
its  work.  The  Professor  took  upon  himself  the 
vows  .  .  .  the  name  of  the  bride  was  Rose 
Duane." 


A  WRITER  OF  BOOKS.  373 

As  for  me,  who  had  also  led  an  Odyssey  Club, 
when  I  read  the  fascinating  romance,  I  queried 
who  this  Professor  "Wolfgang  might  be,  and  even 
more  closely  I  interrogated  my  inner  oracle  con- 
cerning the  reality  of  the  rubicund  Rose  Duane. 
and  especially  of  that  last  reported  act  of  hers,  for 
these  two  names  were  not  to  be  found  on  any  list  of 
my  classes,  or  of  my  acquaintances.  And  there  the 
matter  hangs  to-day. 

XII 

A  Writer  of  Books 

With  this  rubric  I  would  signal  to  my  reader  the 
topmost  flowering  of  the  present  Epoch  namely,  the 
books  which  I  wrote  and  put  into  print.  The  high- 
est point,  I  deem,  of  my  self-realization  was  this 
expression  of  me  in  the  word.  For  therein  I  became 
creative,  to  the  extent  of  my  native  gift;  I  made 
over  into  a  new  world  of  mine  own  that  old  Clas- 
sical world  which  I  had  seen  and  mentally  appro- 
priated. Back  to  the  head  waters  of  my  age's  cul- 
tural evolution  I  had  traveled,  in  quest  of  my  com- 
pleted selfhood,  and  had  given  the  record  of  my 
journey.  Thus  I  recreated  after  my  own  spirit's 
ultimate  form  the  already  created  forms  which  I 
had  found  and  assimilated. 

Moreover  it  was  ancient  Hellas  which  gave  me 
my  task  and  my  opportunity.  For  I  had,  first  of  all, 
to  recover  and  to  reproduce  within  myself  that 
primal  germ  of  our  European  development;  my 


374    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

race  's  civilization  I  was  to  make  my  own,  going  back 
to  its  early  budding  in  Greece,  and  taking  it  up  into 
myself  on  the  spot  of  its  origin,  that  I  might  the 
better  transmute  its  expression  into  my  expression. 
Hence  this  was  the  peculiarly  Greek  epoch  of  my 
whole  career;  I  have  named  it  my  Classical  Rena- 
scence, since  it  was  my  cultural  New  Birth  through 
Greece.  It  was  a  stage  or  term  of  my  life 's  spiritual 
discipline,  lasting  some  seven  or  eight  years,  as  al- 
ready stated,  being  supplementary  to  my  Academic 
training. 

Just  now  there  is  considerable  discussion  con- 
cerning the  value  of  the  Classics.  Greek  and  Latin 
have  been  stoutly  assailed,  being  proclaimed  un- 
worthy of  the  time  spent  upon  them  in  our  institu- 
tions of  learning.  Natural  Science  in  particular 
has  been  the  chief  antagonist  seeking  to  ban  or  at 
least  to  limit  the  ancient  tongues  and  to  put  itself 
in  their  place.  The  new  utilitarian  and  vocational 
trend  also  is  trying  to  elbow  them  out  of  the  curric- 
ulum. To  their  defense  the  old  scholarship  has  ral- 
lied and  has  emphasized  their  many  values,  educa- 
tional, literary,  historical.  A  great  modern  historian 
has  said  that  ancient  History  is  the  key  to  all 
History ;  such  it  is,  and  yet  more,  for  Greek  History 
taken  by  itself  is  the  embryo  of  European  History, 
and  also  of  Historiography.  Still  among  the  warm 
supporters  of  the  Classics  there  is  a  good  deal  of 
discontent,  especially  with  the  method  of  teaching 
them,  wherein  is  deeply  felt  and  loudly  proclaimed 
the  need  of  a  thorough-going  reformation,  which, 


A  WRITER  OF  BOOKS.  375 

however,  has  not  yet  been  very  clearly  formulated. 
Perhaps  as  a  result  of  this  fresh  stirring  of  rather 
stagnant  waters,  we  may  hope  for  a  renewal  of 
interest  in  Classical  studies,  and  possibly  a  pro- 
founder  resurrection  of  the  spirit  of  antique  Hellas. 

As  an  undergraduate  I  felt  some  such  discomfort 
over  my  Classical  instruction,  which  was  probably 
that  of  the  average  American  Colleges  of  the  time. 
In  a  number  of  ways  I  sought  to  remedy  its  defects 
by  outside  studies  of  my  own.  Still  it  laid  the  foun- 
dation upon  which  I  could  build  in  the  future,  if  I 
was  man  enough  to  realize  myself  as  a  man,  making 
actual  in  my  own  training  humanity 's  cultural  evo- 
lution. Through  all  that  long  Greco-Latin  past,  I 
had  to  return  upon  myself,  as  it  were,  to  go  back 
to  my  civilized  beginning,  and  make  it  over  into 
mine  own.  That  was  my  grand  Classical  quest  of 
my  cultural  reality  and  of  man's;  I  had  to  travel 
the  way  of  the  ages  in  order  to  find  myself ;  world- 
renascence  I  must  win  and  transfigure  into  self- 
renascence. 

Anything  else  could  there  be  wanting  after  the 
attainment  of  such  a  desperate  quest  ?  For  me  there 
persisted  a  lack,  a  gap,  a  part  unfulfilled.  Even  on 
the  soil  of  Greece  the  Classical  world  was  yet  a  tra- 
dition, an  echo  of  the  long-ago,  which  I  still  heard 
from  without  me.  What  is  now  to  be  done  ?  I  must 
turn  to  reproduce  it  also,  create  it  as  it  once  was 
created  in  the  aforetime.  Hence  I  too,  if  I  would 
complete  my  past,  must  become  a  Classical  world- 
builder,  such  as  was  its  original    and    originating 


376    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

demiurge,  whose  first  and  best  human  representa- 
tive was  ancient  Homer,  through  whom  I  might 
reach  back  to  that  primal  genetic  act  of  Hellenic 
spirit.  So  the  ultimate  of  tradition  was  to  create 
the  traditional,  to  make  it  reproduce  itself  in  its 
own  primordial  genesis.  Such  might  be  deemed  the 
highest  achievement  of  the  coming  educational  in- 
stitution, namely  the  University  of  Man. 

Now  the  fixity  and  permanent  manifestation  of 
this  new  Classical  course  was  to  be  found  in  the 
printed  page.  Such  had  become  the  supreme  func- 
tion of  the  Writer  of  Books  in  his  Classical  Epoch : 
he  was  not  merely  to  learn,  or  to  assimilate,  or  even 
to  reproduce  old  forms ;  he  had  to  create  a  new  ex- 
pression into  which  he  must  transfigure  the  spirit 
antique,  that  he  attain  his  own  self-expression  for 
a  stage  of  his  life's  total  achievement. 

The  foregoing  account  has  sought  to  indicate  in 
what  way  I  endeavored  to  plant  the  seeds  of  a 
Classical  Renascence  in  myself  first,  and  then  in 
others,  as  one  fruition  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement. 
The  Homeric  poems  were  taken  as  the  best  revela- 
tion as  well  as  the  earliest  starting-point  of  the 
stream  of  civilized  time,  which  we  were  to  follow 
down  the  centuries  into  our  own  present  city  of  St. 
Louis.  But  the  Writer  of  Books  had  as  yet  imper- 
fectly thought  out  and  written  out,  not  merely  his 
exegesis,  but,  what  was  far  more  exacting,  his  re- 
production of  Homer's  work  and  its  co-ordination 
with  the  other  Literary  Bibles.  All  that  remained 
for  a  later  Epoch.    Still  the  study  of  Homer  con- 


A  WRITER  OF  BOOKS.  377 

stituted  the  background  and  the  germinal  poten- 
tiality of  what  I  have  named  my  Classical  Rena- 
scence, as  it  seemingly  did  in  all  ancient  education. 
Accordingly  the  Homeric  fulfillment  in  my  writing 
had  to  wait  for  my  own  fuller  evolution,  which  in 
its  turn  will  seek  its  completer  realization  through 
the  printed  page.  Whereof  something  more  in  its 
place. 

Now  I  have  brought  me  to  the  point  where  it  is 
in  order  to  tell  directly,  yet  briefly,  of  the  books 
composed  and  issued  by  me  during  this  Classical 
Epoch.  As  already  repeatedly  stressed,  it  was  my 
time  of  intense  and  exclusive  Classicism ;  I  properly 
could  not  bring  myself  to  do  anything  else,  except 
in  a  perfunctory  way.  It  seemingly  called  up  in 
me  a  unique  power  of  concentration  on  the  one  su- 
preme object  till  it  got  itself  done,  persisting 
through  workless  moods,  interruptions,  spells  of 
ill  health.  The  visible  output  for  the  whole  Epoch 
was  six  printed  books,  all  of  them  revealing  my 
strenuous  classicality  which  I  had  to  make  over  into 
self-expression  for  my  life's  joy,  as  well  as  for  my 
spirit's  completion,  indeed  I  may  say,  for  my  spir- 
it's salvation. 

I  shall  try  to  put  these  six  books  into  an  order 
which  will  suggest  their  movement  through  this 
Classical  Epoch  of  mine,  from  their  starting  into  it 
till  their  transition  out  of  it  toward  another  stage 
of  my  life's  fulfillment. 

I.  The  general  quest  of  the  Greco-Roman  world 
or  of  the  ancient  Mediterranean  civilization  as  the 


378    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

genetic  source  of  my  mind's  acquired  stores  I 
have  already  indicated.  I,  the  outsider  from  an- 
other continent,  was  seeking  to  put  inside  of  me 
my  own  spiritual  antecedents,  and  thus  to  awaken 
my  sleeping  wholeness.  To  this  preliminary  pur- 
suit I  assign  two  books  of  travel  which  grew  as  I 
journeyed  toward  my  goal. 

The  first  of  these  books  bears  the  title  of  A  Tour 
in  Europe,  whose  purport  and  place  I  have  suffi- 
ciently set  forth  in  a  former  section  under  its  own 
special  designation. 

My  second  book  is  a  Greek  episode  of  travels  be- 
longing emphatically  to  my  Classical  quest  at  its 
most  intensive  stretch  and  is  called  A  Walk  in 
Hellas,  which  has  been  likewise  mentioned  pass- 
ingly in  the  foregoing  account.  It  is  the  concentra- 
tion and  final  rounding-out  of  my  Classical  Jour- 
ney, which  in  it  penetrates  to  the  original  Greek 
life  still  existent  in  its  primitive  haunts  among  the 
dells  and  on  the  slopes  of  Parnassus.  I  may  re- 
mark of  this  book  that  on  the  whole  it  has  been 
received  with  greater  favor  by  the  literary  guild 
than  any  other  writing  of  mine.  This  does  not 
mean  that  it  ever  attained  any  pronounced  vogue 
with  the  public.  I  printed  it  privately  in  1861-2 
at  St.  Louis,  and  it  had  a  small  local  distribution 
chiefly  among  friends.  Generous  Judge  Woerner 
wrote  a  somewhat  lengthy  account  of  it,  which  he 
had  the  influence  to  get  into  a  Sunday  edition  of 
one  of  the  city's  newspapers — a  feat  which  lay  be- 
yond my  power.     Sanborn  took  an  interest  in  the 


A  WRITER  OF  BOOKS.  379 

book,  and  without  any  request  from  me  secured 
for  it  an  offer  from  a  Boston  publisher,  to  whom  I 
consigned  the  rest  of  the  unbound  sheets  for  a 
trial  in  publication.  But  it  persisted  in  being  un- 
saleable, and  after  a  few  years  I  unloaded  the  re- 
mainder upon  myself.  Still  most  of  the  reviews 
leaned  to  the  side  of  a  modified  mercy,  though  a 
few  seized  a  good  chance  to  set  off  their  happiness 
in  abuse.  The  book  continued  to  have  in  my  hands 
a  hidden  little  undercurrent  of  life,  which  many 
years  later  burst  up  to  the  light  with  a  sudden 
prominence,  wholly  unexpected  by  me,  and  never 
since  fully  accounted  for  to  my  mind.  But  let  that 
future  incident  be  remanded  to  its  time. 

It  should  be  added  that  both  these  books  dressed 
themselves  naturally  in  prose,  which  accords  with 
their  fundamental  prosaic  conception.  That  is, 
they  were  primarily  inspired  by  the  external  scenes 
and  circumstances  which  I  was  passing  through 
and  describing;  the  stress  was  upon  the  imme- 
diately seen  and  experienced,  even  if  the  antique 
kept  playing  into  the  narrative  from  the  Classic 
past  with  many  a  suggestion.  I  was  the  reporter 
of  the  real  life  and  nature  before  me,  through 
which,  however,  would  fleet  in  a  common  harmony 
an  ideal  life  and  nature  imaging  a  former  greatness, 
truly  a  stage  of  the  World's  Civilization. 

II.  But  along  with,  yea  out  of  this  essentially 
receptive  prosaic  work  would  break  forth  a  crea- 
tive poetic  activity,  quite  the  reverse  of  the  for- 
mer in  movement  and  character.     Instead  of  ac- 


380    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

cepting  and  recording  in  writ  my  impressions 
from  without  I  began  transmuting  and  recreating 
them  into  a  new-made  world  within  me,  which  I 
projected  into  being  through  my  pen.  The  result 
was  a  group  of  three  poems,  which  likewise  move 
along  the  line  of  my  Classical  Journey,  but  at- 
tuned to  another  rhythm  and  mood.  For  I  was 
now  to  endow  with  a  fresh  existence  what  I  had 
simply  received  and  adopted  before  as  already  ex- 
istent; in  other  words  I  was  to  pass  from  prose 
with  its  theme  outwardly  given  and  prompted,  to 
poetry  whose  theme  itself  was  to  be  new-created 
both  in  form  and  matter. 

Prorsus  Retrorsus.  The  first  verses  of  this  group 
began  to  shape  themselves  in  Rome,  which  old  city 
I  tried  to  re-embody  in  fresh  forms  for  my  own  self- 
expression.  That  is,  I  had  to  make-over  the  trans- 
mitted Rome  before  me  into  my  own  Rome.  Such 
was  the  work  of  the  poet  or  maker.  The  result  can 
be  seen  in  my  little  book  called  Ecce  Roma  (printed 
as  the  First  Part  of  the  volume  entitled  Prorsus 
Retrorsus,  which  label  has  been  decried  as  a  Latin 
riddle  more  brain-befogging  than  even  Carlyle's 
famous  Sartor  Resartus). 

When  the  railroad  train  had  borne  me  into  the 
Eternal  City  on  the  Tiber,  I  was  greeted  from  all 
sides  by  the  ruins  of  an  old  civilization.  Un- 
doubtedly there  stood  before  my  eyes  many  new 
buildings  and  other  modernities,  for  instance  just 
this  steam  car  on  which  I  wheeled  hitherward ;  but 
the  mightiest  presence  here  still  for  me  was  the 


A  WRITER  OF  BOOKS.  381 

ancient  structure  whose  fragments  lay  scattered 
about  in  every  direction.  These  fragments  I  be- 
gan to  pick  up  and  to  reconstruct;  them  I  would 
vivify,  and  bring  to  some  utterance  of  themselves. 
Even  the  living  Roman  People  of  to-day  seemed  a 
huge  torso  of  the  old  Romanus  Populus,  whose 
broken  or  lost  members  I  would  restore  in  imagina- 
tion, giving  to  the  renewed  whole  a  present  voice, 
necessarily  my  own. 

The  outcome  of  my  prolonged  stay  and  contem- 
plation was  a  series  of  some  thirty-nine  urban 
idyls,  if  I  dare  christen  them  with  a  famous  name : 
or  perhaps  their  better  title  would  be  that  of 
Roman  Elegies,  a  term  applied  to  a  somewhat 
similar  kind  of  old  Latin  poetry.  Moreover  they 
had  often  a  pensive  undertone  elegiac  in  the  mod- 
ern sense,  for  they  hymned  echoes  out  of  the  grand 
tragedy  of  ancient  civilization  which  lay  always  in 
their  background.  Thus  I  would  rebuild  old  Rome 
for  myself  from  the  pieces  of  its  ruin,  and  make 
each  piece  reflect  the  whole  in  each  little  elegy,  in 
which  I  too  found  my  own  Roman  expression,  voic- 
ing a  phase  of  my  life's  total  experience. 

On  the  whole  these  Roman  Elegies  of  mine  have 
proved  themselves,  of  all  my  writings  perhaps,  the 
most  remote  and  estranged  from  the  popular  mind. 
Even  trained  intellects  and  friendly  to  me  per- 
sonally have  pronounced  them  poetryless  and  pur- 
poseless, unreadable  in  meter  and  meaning.  Too 
much  foreknowledge  required  of  ancient  History 
and  Mythology,  of  Roman  localities  and  dilapidated 


382    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

buildings,  of  dead  things  generally  in  a  dead 
world — thus  sings  the  outraged  complaint.  Then 
that  ghostly  enigma  staring  at  the  reader  in  the 
first  words  from  a  dead  tongue — Prorsus  Retrorsus 
— stops  him  with  a  sudden  shock,  so  that  he  often 
cannot  get  a  step  further.  So  let  us  quit  the  book 
now,  and  push  ahead.  Every  shred  of  Rome  pre- 
supposes Greece,  let  us  then  move  forward,  or 
backward  if  you  choose,  for  both  these  opposite 
ways  are  here  strangely  blent  and  lead  us  to  the 
same  place.  But  here  again  that  riddlesome  Latin 
lingo  sleuths  us  still  even  in  our  English,  for  now 
we  are  told  that  our  forward  (Prorsus)  is  at  the 
same  time  our  backward  (Retrorsus). 

Epigrammatic  Voyage.  The  considerable  tran- 
sition, both  in  space  and  in  spirit,  from  Rome  to 
Greece,  had  next  to  be  undertaken  by  me,  realized 
lifefully  and  then  poetized.  Herein  the  Greek 
Anthology  furnished  both  suggestion  and  inspira- 
tion, with  its  rich  clusters  of  ancient  epigrams  or 
inscriptions  written  upon  every  conceivable  little 
theme.  So  I  for  the  occasion  became  a  Greek  epi- 
grammatist, and  I  turned  into  a  versicle  each  pass- 
ing view  or  impression  punctuating  my  pathway. 
The  result  was  again  a  little  book  which  I  called  an 
Epigrammatic  Voyage,  meandering  over  sea  and 
land  till  I  reached  Athens.  (At  first  printed  separ- 
ately, but  now  as  the  Second  Part  of  Prorsus 
Retrorsus) . 

In  this  book  it  was  my  delight  to  re-live  still  an- 
other phase  of  Greek  life  and  to  re-create  it  as  a 


A  WRITER  OF  BOOKS.  383 

part  of  my  own,  moulding  my  most  modern  self 
into  an  antique  poetic  form,  since  I  continued  to 
meter  it  after  the  hexametral  elegiac.  This  was  no 
translation,  but  a  poetic  transfusion  of  new  blood 
into  an  ancient  body  through  a  fresh  reproduc- 
tion. The  old  epigrams  of  the  Greek  Anthology  re- 
veal better  than  any  other  ancient  work  the  per- 
vasive poetic  spirit  of  all  Greek  existence  down  to 
the  humblest.  Hence  their  creative  fascination  for 
me  in  my  Greek  mood.  I  often  interwove  them  into 
my  later  talks  on  Greece  and  her  art;  still  these 
dear  beautiful  playthings  of  Hellas,  so  native  to 
me  for  years,  I  never  could  quite  domesticate,  I 
have  to  believe,  in  any  American  heart. 

But  thus  I  had  transformed  myself  into  a  bub- 
bling line  of  versicles  strung  along  all  the  way 
from  the  Roman  to  the  Athenian  world-centers  of 
antiquity.  A  rare  enjoyment  it  was  of  the  deep 
undertow  of  the  old  Greek  life,  revealing  its  ever- 
active  subliminal  poetry  as  it  shot  up  into  its  first 
atoms  of  expression,  which  were  gathered  and 
vased  for  a  thousand  years  and  more  into  the  afore- 
said Greek  Anthology.  Now  this  atomic  Greek 
life  stimulated  me  to  a  new  creation  of  itself  in  my 
own  life,  when  the  right  environment  embraced  me, 
and  I  was  ready  to  respond  to  its  spell.  Hence  was 
forged  along  with  my  every  step  this  somewhat 
sagging  chain  of  separately  rounded  out  epigrams, 
two  hundred  or  so,  which  interlinked  for  me  the 
Tiber  and  the  Ilissus. 

Delphic  Days.    When  I  reached  Athens,  I  found 


384    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

it  too  a  civilized  ruin,  like  Rome  in  this  regard,  or 
it  may  be  called  a  beautiful  fragment  of  a  ruined 
civilization.  Still  this  likewise  I  would  take  unto 
myself  and  make  it  spiritually  mine  own,  identify- 
ing it,  as  far  as  I  might,  with  my  Classical  self  in 
its  present  Renascence.  So  I  lived  in  and  also 
loved  old-new  Athens  for  several  busy  months. 
But  the  former  dissatisfaction  arose  anew  which 
I  had  felt  at  Rome,  whispering  to  me:  "Here  is 
not  thy  goal;  start  once  more  for  the  head-waters 
of  this  Nile-stream  of  antique  life,  still  hidden  to 
thy  look  and  to  thy  soul.  Report  tells  thee  that 
thou  mayst  find  its  first  fountain  off  yonder  on  the 
Parnassus  in  the  region  of  ancient  Delphi.  So  set 
out  again,  be  thy  journey  without  a  comrade,  go 
thy  ways  afoot  and  alone." 

Accordingly  I  pushed  forward  (or  backward)  to 
Delphi  with  its  vivid  drama  of  Nature,  visible  out- 
wardly as  of  old,  and  peopled  with  primitive  Greek 
characters  living  yet  to-day  and  talking  a  kind  of 
Homeric  dialect,  and  even  singing  many  a  little 
epical  adventure  of  their  heroes.  And  so  it  came 
about  that  this  elemental  Parnassian  life  I  eagerly 
adopted  and  appreciated,  starting  soon  to  re-pro- 
duce it  over  into  my  inner  world,  and  then  shap- 
ing outwardly  in  verse  its  many-hued  transforma- 
tions which  at  last  fascicled  themselves  into  a  book- 
let called  Delphic  Days. 

Those  Delphic  idyls  are  essentially  rural;  they 
stress  the  present  in  scenery  and  costume,  in  lan- 
guage and  emotion,  also  in  man  and  woman.    Still 


A  WRITER  OF  BOOKS.  385 

they,  like  Delphi  herself,  hold  within  their  small 
bosoms  a  buried  past  which  peeps  out  here  and 
there  from  its  cover,  and  which  can  be  unearthed 
by  a  little  digging.  Since  I  was  there,  the  ancient 
Delphic  temple  has  been  excavated,  and  also  va- 
rious parts  of  the  old  town.  But  Delphi  appeared 
to  me  not  the  huge  torso  of  some  antique  Hercules 
like  Rome,  like  Athens;  it  had  still  a  complete, 
unbroken  though  small  life  of  its  own,  which  had 
maintained  itself  through  the  milleniums  from  twi- 
lit  primordial  Greece,  undoubtedly  with  many 
changes.  Accordingly  in  Delphic  Days  I  sought  to 
re-animate  within  myself  that  original  protoplasm 
of  early  Hellas,  and  then  to  portray  this  real  sur- 
vival of  it  here  on  the  real  Parnassus.  Hence  it 
comes  that  these  poems  are  relatively  easy  to  un- 
derstand, since  they  have  little  of  erudition,  or  of 
mythology,  or  of  ruins  antique.  Still  some  Classi- 
cal knowledge  is  dangerously  pre-supposed. 

With  these  three  poetical  books  was  completed  the 
versified  portion  of  my  Greco-Roman  Journey,  or 
the  little  Epic  of  my  Classical  Renascence.  I  may 
egoistically  conceive  it  as  my  little  Iliad,  in  which 
the  solitary  hero,  this  Ego,  with  his  army  of  one 
soldier,  who  was  himself,  pushing  forth  from  St. 
Louis  across  continents  and  sailing  over  oceans  to 
attack  and  capture,  not  the  hill  of  old  Troy,  but  the 
very  top  of  Mount  Parnassus  itself  and  its  whole 
antique  life.  Such  a  warlike  expedition,  however, 
did  not  seek  to  burn  or  destroy  that  lofty  world- 
citadel  of  our  race's  civilization,  but  would  strive 


386    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

to  restore,  to  renew,  and  to  re-create  it  at  least  in 
myself,  and  in  any  other  questing  self  whom  I 
might  persuade  to  hearken  or  to  read  my  fresh 
construction  of  it  through  voice  or  through  print, 
in  prose  or  in  verse.  At  any  rate  to  me  this  poetical 
foray  was  one  continued  music-festival  of  ancient 
Classical  harmonies,  which  found  its  own  reward 
in  the  spirit's  deepest  attunement. 

But  if  I  can  summon  audacity  enough  to  keep 
the  Homeric  simile  running,  which  I  have  already 
once  tapped,  I  may  add  that  this  little  Iliad  was 
succeeded  by  a  little  Odyssey  of  mine,  the  return 
home  of  the  Classical  wanderer,  if  not  to  the  shores 
of  small  sunny  Ithaca,  at  least  to  the  grandiose 
mud-stream  of  the  ever-roiled  Mississippi.  Such 
was  my  Ulyssean  nostos,  or  spiritual  home-coming 
from  my  Parnassian  expedition,  which  being  in- 
grown a  musical  part  of  my  life,  had  to  realize  it- 
self in  a  versified  expression,  that  is,  in  another 
poetical  booklet. 

III.  This  was  baptized  under  the  name  of 
Agamemnon's  Daughter,  which  composition  I  would 
like  to  stress  as  the  third  leading  stage  of  this  my 
poetized  Classical  Renascence,  inasmuch  as  the  lat- 
ter starts  now  to  moving  out  of  itself  into  what 
comes  next  in  my  life's  ever-advancing  yet  ever- 
returning  cycle.  Thus  the  poem  is  essentially  the 
transition  from  the  antique  to  the  modern,  which 
transition  pours  itself  into  an  old  Greek  vase  of  a 
mythus,  that  of  Iphigenia.  The  verse,  the  spirit, 
the  style  breaks  away  from  the  foregoing  elegiac 


A  WRITER  OF  BOOKS.  387 

hexameters  and  strikes  a  new  key-note  in  the 
rhymed  iambic  stanza  of  eight  lines.  The  music, 
the  inwardness,  even  the  organization  bespeak  the 
Romantic  transforming  the  heart  of  the  Classic. 
Thus  the  poem  is  a  continual  metamorphosis  of 
the  old  into  the  new,  to  which  the  mind  of  the 
reader  is  to  keep  itself  always  attuned. 

The  image  of  Iphigenia  (Agamemnon's  Daugh- 
ter) followed  me  everywhere  around  through 
Greece,  from  Athens  to  Delphi,  from  Delphi  to 
Mycenae,  from  Mycenae  to  Aulis,  from  Aulis  back  to 
Delphi.  I  was  conscious  of  her  presence  at  my 
side,  but  I  could  not  yet  catch  her  shape  and  ban 
it  into  verse,  though  I  often  tried.  She  crossed  the 
ocean  with  me  homeward ;  like  a  ghost  she  haunted 
me  for  years  in  St.  Louis,  till  at  last  one  day 
through  a  fresh  experience  I  grew  able  to  clutch 
the  very  form  of  her  soul,  which  I  then  could  re- 
create for  my  new  self-expression,  as  being  a  stage 
of  my  own  evolution  just  attained  and  crying  out 
to  be  realized. 

It  should  be  noted  that  I  did  not  in  this  work 
pick  up  individual  impressions  and  occurrences 
along  my  path  and  transmute  them  into  separate 
elegies  or  epigrams  or  idyls  as  heretofore.  On  the 
contrary  I  took  a  connected  story,  that  ancient 
mythus  of  Iphigenia,  and  overwrought  it  into  an 
integral  part  of  my  own  life's  experience  and  ut- 
terance. Still  that  old  tale  in  time  revealed  itself 
to  me  as  a  torso  also,  like  Greece  and  Rome,  as  a 
mythical  fragment  which  I  had  to  make  whole  in 


388    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PAET  SECOND. 

my  creative  spirit.  Hence  instead  of  the  two  Iphi- 
genias  handed  down  from  antiquity  by  Euripides, 
I  had  to  create  four,  or  rather  they  all  were  the 
one  Iphigenia  completing  herself  in  her  four  grand 
stages  or  crises  of  her  spiritual  evolution.  To  use 
a  former  comparison,  the  Greek  mythus  of  Iphi- 
genia, like  the  torso  of  Hercules  in  the  Vatican 
Museum,  had  no  head  and  no  feet,  no  right  begin- 
ning or  end,  but  only  a  lopped-off  body  which  had 
to  be  restored  mythically  before  it  in  its  wholeness 
could  be  poetized.  So  I  fabled  an  Iphigenia  at 
Mycenae  for  the  overture  and  an  Iphigenia  at  Del- 
phi for  the  finale  of  the  finished  work. 

Thus  the  eidolon  of  Iphigenia,  that  completest 
Greek  woman-soul,  haunted  me  for  years,  fleeting 
airily  throughout  my  whole  Greco-Roman  Epoch, 
in  a  kind  of  sub-conscious  prophetic  presence,  which 
I  was  at  last  to  evoke  into  a  conscious  reality, 
thereby  building  the  bridge  out  of  my  Classical 
Renascence.  So  I  freed  myself  of  her  ghostly  pur- 
suit by  the  exorcising  magic  of  the  written  word. 
Not  a  few  emotional  currents  out  of  my  own  experi- 
ence streamed  into  and  through  this  poem,  where- 
of I  have  already  mentioned  one,  that  of  the  Kin- 
dergartners.  Iphigenia 's  tale  became  for  me  the 
woman's  world-mythus,  in  deep  parallelism  to  the 
man's,  the  Christ-tale,  to  which  it  is  startlingly 
similar.  I  ought  to  add  that  already  at  St.  Louis 
I  was  first  introduced  to  Goethe's  beautiful  Iphi- 
genia by  Brockmeyer,  who  knew  her  and  exalted 
her  with  his  sort  of  boisterous  admiration.    I  kept 


A  WRITER  OF  BOOKS.  389 

her  acquaintance  and  took  her  along  with  me  to 
her  old  home-land  in  the  course  of  my  Classical 
Journey,  during  which  she  unfolded  for  me  into  a 
marvelously  new  personality,  far  richer  and  more 
universal  than  Goethe's.  (A  fuller  account  of  this 
whole  subject  can  be  found  in  the  appendix  to  the 
second  edition  of  my  Agamemnon's  Daughter) . 

With  this  final  book  of  the  six  I  had  rounded- 
out  my  distinctively  Classical  Epoch  lasting  seven 
years  and  more  of  exclusive  and  absolute  devotion 
to  the  winning  of  the  antique  world  and  to  its  ex- 
pression in  my  own  tongue.  The  outer  spatial 
flight  of  this  Epoch  may  be  figured  as  a  kind  of 
ellipse,  which,  rising  up  from  St.  Louis,  topped 
the  real  Greek  Parnassus,  then  circled  back  again 
to  its  starting-point.  I  culled  the  spiritual  treas- 
ures possible  to  me  along  my  path  and  strung  them 
on  the  foregoing  bead-roll  of  six  books,  which  ex- 
press what  I  have  labeled  my  Classical  Renascence, 
all  of  them  being  printed  and  distributed  by  my- 
self, except  one  for  a  little  while,  as  already  ex- 
plained. In  the  sense  of  the  book-trade  these  works 
remain  unpublished  to  this  moment.  I  can  truly 
say  that  I  never  offered  them  to  any  publisher  in 
manuscript ;  but  I  have  once  in  a  while  amused  my- 
self at  getting  his  quick  refusal  of  my  stuff  when 
he  found  it  already  in  type.  Still  he  never  would 
confess  that  he  was  firstly,  and  often  lastly,  a 
printer. 

Nor  were  these  books  ever  put  through  the  maga- 
zine mill  and  articled  in  small  bits  for  the  sake  of 


390    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

publicity,  of  which  process  so  many  good  volumes 
to-day  bear  the  lasting  marks  or  scars.  I  never 
submitted  the  shorter  poems  to  the  editor  of  any 
periodical,  though  a  few  times  I  have  been  asked  for 
a  specimen,  and  have  furnished  it  gladly  without 
price. 

Nor  did  I  ever  succeed  in  getting  the  average 
Profesor  of  Greek  in  College  or  University,  whom 
I  would  meet  occasionally,  to  take  any  living  part 
in  this  my  rejuvenation  of  Classical  antiquity, 
which  is  or  ought  to  be  a  kind  of  re-animation  of 
his  rather  sterilized  and  often  mummified  calling. 
Some  verbal  or  metrical  or  exegetical  or  even 
epexegetical  stumbling  block  he  was  sure  to  kick 
up  and  fall  over  in  a  learned  sprawl,  where  he 
could  coil  down  at  ease  in  the  traditional  security 
of  transmitted  erudition.  The  fragments  of  the 
Classical  world  seemed  to  be  his  chief  knowledge 
as  well  as  his  sole  delight ;  my  plan  of  not  only  re- 
storing the  broken  old  torso  of  all  Hellas,  but  of 
re-modeling  a  new  statue  of  her  sprung  of  a  new 
conception  belonging  to  our  own  age,  he  deemed 
chimerical,  when  he  understood  it,  which  was  not 
always.  I  may  here  remark  that  in  the  somewhat 
extensive  discussion  of  Classical  instruction  going 
on  just  at  present,  its  own  pedagogues  are  the  keen- 
est critics  of  its  moribund  pedagogy. 

I  have  been  often  asked,  and  do  not  fail  to  ask  my- 
self, what  is  the  value  of  this  long  moneyless  and 
thankless  revaluation  of  old  Classical  values?  I 
esteem  it  a  stage  of  human  culture  which  every 


A  WRITER  OF  BOOKS.  391 

succeeding  stage  has  to  regenerate  in  and  through 
itself  in  order  to  be  cultural  at  all.  And  every  in- 
dividual man  if  he  is  to  attain  the  full  manhood  of 
his  kind,  cannot  leave  out  its  highest  realization  in 
the  course  of  its  antecedent  evolution.  Through 
some  form  of  the  Classical  Renascence  he  is  to 
make  himself  complete  in  our  Occidental  world; 
then,  too,  he  may  be  able  to  impart  his  completeness, 
when  he  has  won  it  through  his  own  creative 
energy.  He  can  give  away  his  best  only  when  he 
owns  it,  and  he  owns  it  only  when  he  has  made  it 
himself. 

My  Classical  Renascence  as  here  set  forth  in  its 
various  labors  I  deem  an  indispensable  part  of 
what  I  have  called  my  Super-vocation — a  work  to 
be  done  for  its  own  worth,  and  if  need  be,  without- 
pay  or  even  recognition.  Such  a  discipline  has  no 
other  end  than  itself;  it  is  not  merely  its  own  ex- 
cuse for  being,  but  is  its  own  supreme  reward ;  all 
other  human  incentives,  such  as  wealth,  fame,  in- 
fluence, are  only  servants  in  the  mansion  of  this  one 
sovereign  end  of  our  existence.  These  servants 
are  very  convenient  and  indeed  necessary  up  to  a 
certain  utility;  but  at  times  they  may  refuse  to 
take  their  subordinate  place  in  the  economy  of 
life,  and  seek  to  usurp  the  sovereignty.  Then 
comes  the  crucial  test  of  the  man's  ultimate  value; 
he  will  dare  become  his  own  servant,  rather  than 
be  the  slave  of  his  servants.  Some  such  test  I  felt 
now  to  be  crushing  in  upon  me,  and  producing  no 
little  unrest,  but  without  a  serious  breach  in  my 


392    THE  ST,  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

deeper  resolution,  whereof  the  future  must  certify- 
to  the  fact. 

This  Writer  of  Books,  therefore,  found  his  solid 
reward  in  the  practice  of  his  own  creative  energy ; 
he  might  even  call  it  a  foretaste  of  his  eternal  hap- 
piness. In  this  way  he  felt  and  communed  with 
the  first  sources  of  being ;  or,  to  employ  perchance 
a  more  daring  locution,  he  shared  in  the  original 
Primal  Love  creating  the  "World.  At  any  rate  he 
may  here  repeat  the  sentence  of  faith  already  cited 
from  his  private  breviary:  Scribers  est  orare. 
Prayers  are  sometimes  paid  for,  it  is  said ;  but 
mine  were  not,  and  all  these  books  of  mine  are  in 
their  first  genesis  my  orisons. 

And  here  at  the  close  of  the  present  Epoch  I  may 
be  permitted  to  turn  one  brief  cast  of  my  pro- 
phetic search-light  upon  the  farther  future,  fore- 
saying  that  this  Classic  Renascence  simply  preludes 
and  prepares  for  another  and  deeper  Renascence, 
not  only  mine  but  time's  also,  namely  the  Self's 
very  Renascence  in  its  own  native  form  of  utter- 
ances. Or  let  it  be  thusly  said :  underneath  this  outer 
Classical  Itinerary  runs  an  inner  unconscious 
Psychical  Itinerary,  which  with  the  years  is  des- 
tined to  burst  up  to  consciousness  and  win  a  new 
self-expression  in  its  own  science. 

But  mark  now  the  shifting  of  the  scene,  both 
outer  and  inner.  Along  with  the  change  to  a  new 
stage  of  my  spirit's  development,  is  conjoined  a 
most  surprising  change  to  a  new  locality  as  the 
right  environment  of  my  fresh  task.  Guess  me  the 
name  of  the  place. 


CHAPTER  SECOND 

The  Renascence  Evolved  and  Propagated 

Here,  to  my  mind  looking  backward  over  life's 
mountain  peaks,  appear  in  a  single  group  or  mass 
the  next  ten  or  a  dozen  years,  representing  this 
cardinal  fact:  the  evolution  both  internal  and  ex- 
ternal, of  the  foregoing  Renascence,  which  in  its 
classical  form  could  only  be  germinal,  yet  not  for 
me  alone,  but  likewise  for  all  civilization. 

Now  this  Renascence  in  my  special  case  unfolds 
doubly:  first,  inwardly  into  the  four  Great  Books 
of  Literature  with  my  completed  expressions  of 
them  in  the  so-called  commentaries ;  secondly,  into 
their  outer  propagation  over  the  country  at  some 
favorable  places  for  growth.  Moreover  I  may  add 
that  this  was  peculiarly  my  Chicago  Epoch,  in  con- 
trast to  the  previous  one  which  had  centered  in  St. 
Louis. 

What  has  been  won  in  the  foregoing  Epoch  at 
St.  Louis  and  Concord,  is  next  to  be  scattered  far 
and  away  over  all  the  land,  to  the  outreach  of  my 
ability.  The  propagation  of  our  so-called  Rena- 
scence, or  of  that  phase  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement 
which  I  had  especially  cultivated  and  developed, 
must  now  be  the  work  of  a  new  Epoch  quite  dis- 
tinct  from   the   one   which     I   had   just   passed 

393 


394    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

through.  First  of  all,  the  change  involves  a  break- 
ing loose  from  my  two  chief  centers  hitherto,  and 
a  dispersion  of  energy,  both  mental  and  physical, 
in  order  to  plant  the  seed-corn  in  as  large  a  terri- 
tory as  possible. 

Thus  it  was  for  me  a  time  of  wandering,  and  I 
rambled  continuously  over  a  greater  space  than 
ever  before  or  afterward  in  my  career.  My  jour- 
neys extended  from  Boston,  New  York  and  Wash- 
ington along  the  Atlantic  Coast,  to  Omaha  and 
Minneapolis  in  the  "West.  Still  the  most  of  my 
work  lay  in  the  two  central  States,  Indiana  and 
Illinois.  I  can  truly  say  that  this  was  the  busiest 
portion  of  my  entire  life.  It  lasted  some  thirteen 
years  from  1884  till  1897,  to  reckon  its  full  day 
from  dawn  to  sunset.  I  was  forty-three  years  when 
it  started,  and  I  kept  up  the  campaign  till  I 
brushed  the  border  of  old-age,  and  heard  its  warn- 
ing. Moreover  the  Epoch  itself  began  to  wane  in 
strength  and  fervor,  having  delivered  its  message, 
and  also  to  show  signs  of  making  a  transition  into 
a  new  and  more  advanced  stage  of  that  total  life  of 
which  it  was  but  a  part.  So  much  for  the  outer 
spatial  dispersion  of  myself  as  well  as  of  my  teach- 
ings. 

Next  I  may  tell  something  of  the  methods  which 
I  employed  in  this  propagation.  First  was  the 
single  lecture  (or  Lyceum)  which  I  always  deemed 
insufficient  in  itself,  though  needful  as  a  stimulus 
and  as  an  overture  to  deeper  and  more  organic 
work.    Hence  I  would  try  to  push  the  interested 


THE  RENASCENCE  EVOLVED,  ETC.         395 

listeners  forward  into  the  Class,  which  took  a 
course  of  connected  lessons  on  a  great  and  abiding 
theme,  like  a  Literary  Bible.  But  the  plan  did 
not  stop  with  these  Classes,  which,  after  being 
trained  separately  in  a  given  locality,  were  unified 
and  intensified  in  the  Literary  School,  which  was 
held  eight  times  in  Chicago  alone,  and  several  times 
elsewhere.  To  a  still  higher  and  final  stage  did  we 
strive  to  carry  the  work,  which  we  sought  to  make 
complete  and  permanent  in  what  at  last  became 
known  under  the  name  of  the  Communal  Univer- 
sity. 

Now  these  four  pedagogical  forms  or  methods 
will  continually  recur  in  the  course  of  this  narra- 
tive, so  that  it  is  worth  while  to  keep  them  in  mind 
by  a  recapitulation:  (1)  the  Lecture,  (2)  the 
Class,  (3)  the  Literary  School,  (4)  the  Communal 
University.  Though  these  separate  forms  were  old, 
they  together  constituted  a  new  order,  or  it  may  be, 
a  new  system  of  pedagogy,  specially  applicable  to 
social  conditions,  as  I  found  them  here  in  the  "West, 
but  lying  outside  the  traditional  lines  of  education. 
It  was  not  hostile  to  the  transmitted  educational 
training,  but  supplementary.  For  the  human  be- 
ing as  active  citizen  has  still  to  receive  his  or  her 
best  and  deepest  instruction  after  the  High  School, 
the  College,  the  Scholastic  University,  as  they  have 
been  handed  down  from  the  past.  They  cannot 
educate  for  life,  as  they  often  claim,  for  life  itself 
is  to  be  always  an  education,  and  must  have  in  this 
field  its  own  educative  institution.    Indeed  profes- 


396    THE  ST.  L0VI8  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

sional  educators  themselves  ought  especially  to  be 
pupils  in  this  Higher  School. 

But  behold  the  unexpected  turn:  amid  all  this 
scattered  propagation  and  far-away  dispersion  of 
mind  and  body,  a  center  insists  upon  creating  it- 
self just  for  the  purpose  of  better  dissemination. 
This  center  was  not  St.  Louis,  not  any  city  of  the 
Atlantic  Coast,  but  that  youngest  Westerner,  Chi- 
cago. Unwillingly  I  may  say,  and  at  first  uncon- 
sciously I  found  myself  driven  toward  the  over- 
mastering rival  of  St.  Louis,  whose  phenomenal 
rise  to  supremacy  I  had  watched  for  many  years 
with  no  little  jealousy,  I  must  confess.  I  had  seen 
many  a  changeling  pass  from  the  river-town  to  the 
lake-town  with  a  feeling  of  reproof  for  their  dis- 
loyalty. And  now  I  woke  up  to  find  myself  just 
such  a  disloyal  changeling  in  spite  of  my  own  self- 
reproach  and  even  inner  repugnance.  I  turned  my 
breast  against  that  irresistible  current  surging  Chi- 
cago-wards, and  tried  to  swim  up  stream,  only  to 
see  myself  borne  into  the  heart  of  the  maelstrom, 
which  was  just  the  swirling  city  itself. 

Thus  my  Chicago  time  opens,  which  starts  and 
runs  parallel  with  this  Epoch  of  Propagation.  I 
soon  discovered  that  nowhere  else  could  such  a  task 
be  accomplished.  Chicago  had  already  become  the 
great  center  of  Western  distribution,  both  for  mer- 
chandise and  for  intelligence.  The  latter  fact  I 
could  not  at  first  believe,  till  immediate  experience 
pounded  it  painfully  into  my  brain.  Moreover  the 
city  itself  began  to  offer  me  a  new  and  very  inter- 


THE  RENASCENCE  EVOLVED,  ETC.         397 

esting  problem,   quite   different  from  that  of  St. 
Louis  or  of  any  community  I  had  ever  known  be- 
fore— a  problem  that  appealed  mightily  to  the  un- 
traditional  motive  ever  propelling  me  from  within. 
So  I  was  to  receive  here,  too,  a  communal  training. 
'To  my  mind  Chicago  soon  started  to  reveal  itself 
in  three  marked  phases,  which  rounded  out   to- 
gether one  great  all-overwhelming  process.    In  the 
first  place,  the  town  sped  away  with  a  furious  mo- 
mentum, being  externally  dashed  forward  on  the 
roaring  stream  of  events,  as  they  drove  it  and  with 
it,  so  that  it  seemed  all  afloat.    But  in  the  second 
place  the  city  was  even  more  violently  agitated  in 
and    through    itself,    becoming   a   very    whirlpool 
of  whizzing  humanity,  within  which  it  was  almost 
dangerous  to  get  caught.    Thirdly,  this  rapid  revo- 
lution generated  a  kind  of  centrifugal  energy  which 
hurled   the   city's   transactions   of   every   sort  in 
every  direction  over  the  land,  making  it  the  great 
center  of  distribution,  to  which  all  products  were 
drawn,  swallowed  up  for  the  moment,  and  then 
regurgitated   far   away   every-whither.     No   other 
urban  maelstrom  like  it  on  this  globe  is  the  general 
verdict  of  travelers.     It  seemed  to  challenge  com- 
parison with  any  one  of  the  elemental  Furies  of 
Nature — the  earthquake,  the  cyclone,  the  volcano 
in  eruption. 

Thus  the  outer  appearance  of  Chicago  as  well  as 
the  inner  character  seemed  the  opposite  to  that  of 
St.  Louis,  whose  law  after  1880  was  relatively  re- 
tardation which  at  times  seemed  to  approach  stag- 


398    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

nation.  The  contrast  between  the  two  cities  was 
smiting,  and  became  the  literary  common-place  of 
all  recording  observers,  partial  and  impartial. 
Somehow  the  great  tide  of  Western  migration  came 
pouring  into  and  through  Chicago,  which  repre- 
sented the  world  afloat,  she  being  afloat  and  awhirl 
herself.  Meanwhile  the  paralyzing  disillusion  of 
St.  Louis  lay  heavy  upon  her  brooding  spirit.  So 
I  was  compelled  to  re-read  the  old  tale  of  two  cities 
not  in  the  romance  of  Illusion  now,  but  in  the  fact, 
as  this  unrolled  before  my  eyes.  I  took  lodgment 
in  Chicago,  but  my  domicile  there  never  could  get 
fully  anchored,  the  city  itself  being  so  unanchored, 
as  if  it  were  a  thousand  floating  islands  on  Lake 
Michigan. 

(Well  might  I  ask  myself :  Have  I  any  function 
here  in  this  most  restless,  uncertain,  transitory  ex- 
istence? The  head  gets  dizzy  at  first  with  merely 
looking  at  the  swirl  and  you  begin  to  query,  what 
will  become  of  you,  with  your  philosophic  emphasis 
upon  the  abiding  and  the  essential,  if  you  once 
plunge  into  this  cyclonic  ever-shifting  multitude? 
After  some  days  of  drifting,  I  concluded  that  my 
part  was  to  stabilize  it,  to  steady  it,  to  put  some- 
thing permanent  into  the  evanescence  before  me,  as 
far  as  my  bit  of  power  would  hold  out.  The  ven- 
ture began  to  interest  me,  to  allure  me,  to  absorb 
me,  yea  to  hypnotize  me  through  its  very  hazard. 
In  this  sense  I  became  a  gambler  literally  on  Chi- 
cago change  or  rather  on  Chicago  changefulness. 

But  what  capital  could  I  get  for  such  a  specula- 


THE  RENASCENCE  EVOLVED,  ETC.  399 

tion  ?  I  had  brought  with  me  from  my  former  ac- 
quisitions the  intensive  study  and  interpretation 
of  the  great  Literary  Bibles  of  the  Race,  which 
have  shown  a  more  enduring  power  of  immortality 
than  any  other  spiritual  treasures  of  the  past.  I 
have  already  mentioned  my  labors  in  the  exposi- 
tion, propagation,  and  reproduction  of  the  four  su- 
preme poets — Homer,  Dante,  Shakespeare  and 
Goethe — to  whom  I  had  devoted  several  years  at 
St.  Louis  and  at  Concord.  They  were  the  ever- 
lasting anchorage  of  all  Literature,  now  becoming 
the  most  transitory  of  sublunary  things,  anchorage 
too  of  those  spirits  who  sought  for  some  fastness  in 
the  fleeting  panorama  of  this  our  sense-life.  No 
shriller,  more  grinding,  pulverizing  contradiction 
could  be  found  than  that  between  Chicago  and  the 
Literary  Bibles,  symbols  respectively  of  the  mo- 
mentary and  of  the  perennial  in  human  achieve- 
ment. 

Now  the  fascination  came  strongly  over  me  to 
perform  just  this  feat  of  planting  the  opposition 
of  all  Time,  indeed  the  extremes  of  the  Universe 
itself — that  of  eternity  and  that  of  the  instant — 
right  in  the  heart  of  the  purest  manifestation  of 
restless  fugacity  on  our  globe.  Could  it  be  done 
without  money,  without  influence,  even  without 
books,  other  than  the  simple  text  of  our  Literary 
Bibles?  For  I  had  nothing  else.  Undoubtedly 
there  was  some  literature  written  and  printed  in 
Chicago,  yes  a  good  deal  of  it,  but  it  was  almost 
wholly  of  the.  public  press,  and  of  all  the  ephemeral 


400    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

records  of  the  ephemeral  in  this  inky  deluge  of 
ours,  the  Chicago  newspaper  was  then  the  most 
ephemeral,  and  it  still  is  not  lacking  in  that  quality. 
Indeed  it  had  no  belief  in  immortality  of  any 
sort,  especially  in  the  lettered  one;  and  it  would 
jet  its  Mephistophelean  sneer  at  any  attempt  to 
introduce  such  a  faith  into  Chicago's  fleet  modern- 
ity. Eugene  Field,  born  and  reared  in  St.  Louis, 
but  a  fugitive  (or  deserter)  to  Chicago  like  my- 
self, though  in  a  very  different  vocation,  made  fun 
of  our  Literary  Schools  in  his  journalistic  Sharps 
and  Flats,  and  set  all  the  scoffers  of  the  town  to 
sniggering  and  mocking  at  us  for  our  Chicagoless 
follies.  Still  I  must  say,  to  the  credit  of  "Genie" 
Field,  as  our  St.  Louis  printers  used  to  call  him 
affectionately,  when  he  was  there  a  genially 
crapulous  reporter,  that  he  induced  his  journal,  the 
Chicago  News,  to  hire  me  to  write  an  article  on 
Irving 's  rendition  of  Faust,  which  was  then  on  the 
stage  in  Chicago.  I  accepted  the  offer  for  the  sake  of 
the  publicity,  inasmuch  as  I  was  then  having  classes 
in  Goethe's  Faust,  and  was  working  desperately  to 
get  ready  for  our  Literary  School,  or  general  In- 
stitute of  Lectures  on  the  same  subject.  Field  of 
course  never  came  to  the  classes  or  to  the  Literary 
School,  but  he  did  hunt  me  up,  and  he  gave  me 
box  tickets  to  the  theater  to  see  the  play  and  its 
famous  English  actors,  solacing  me  by  the  way 
with  some  very  white  complimentary  flimflams,  tell- 
ing me  confidentially  how  much  he  "had  profited 
by  reading  my  books. ' '    I  was  not  cruel  enough  to 


THE  RENASCENCE  EVOLVED,  ETC.         401 

test  his  knowledge  of  them,  but  I  cannot  think  that 
Field  expected  me  to  take  his  words  at  ear-value, 
though  I  appreciated  his  dexterous  courtesy,  and 
his  generosity  self-suggested,  for  I  never  would 
have  dared  ask  him  for  such  a  favor.  In  his  earlier 
days  as  a  reporter,  he  must  have  often  heard  at 
St.  Louis  of  our  Movement  and  of  its  members,  and 
he  was  probably  astonished  at  its  audacious  migra- 
tion to  Chicago,  the  supposed  newspaperial  In- 
ferno of  scribbling  demons,  into  which  I  now  dared 
venture,  pen  in  hand. 

The  article  was  duly  written  and  published,  tak- 
ing up  about  a  column  in  length,  as  I  recollect,  for 
I  have  lost  or  mislaid  the  document  somewhere  in 
my  wanderings,  though  I  thought  to  preserve  it  as 
a  keepsake.  It  was  not  a  good  article,  a  kind  of 
abnormal  hybrid,  for  I  tried  to  newspaperize  my 
Faust  work,  thus  producing  an  unnatural  cross  be- 
tween journalism  and  philosophy,  very  unpleasing 
in  feat  are  to  the  parent,  and  probably  not  attract- 
ive to  the  public.  I  would  have  rejected  it,  if  I 
had  been  in  the  judgment  seat  of  the  editor.  Great 
was  my  surprise,  however,  when  the  office  sent  me 
a  check  for  twenty-five  dollars,  which,  I  can  still 
say,  as  I  did  a  few  years  ago,  "has  remained  the 
first,  last,  and  only  compensation  in  money  for 
any  writing  of  mine  up  to  this  day."  Undoubted- 
ly some  of  my  books  have  been  sold,  but  they  were 
never  written  with  a  view  to  their  saleability.  But 
here  appeared  the  first  and  the  last  exception. 

The  chief  lesson  of  my  article  was  given  to  my- 


402    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

self,  who  then  and  there  learned  my  total  lack  of 
fitness  for  any  form  of  periodiealism.  The  editor 
probably  thought  so  too,  for  he  never  asked  me  to 
send  him  another  article,  though  there  was  the 
opportunity.  And  he  was  right.  In  fact  I  had 
already  at  St.  Louis  had  my  deterrent  experience 
with  the  magazine,  whereof  I  have  given  some  ac- 
count on  a  previous  page.  The  newspaper,  as  the 
ephemeral  record  of  the  Ephemeral,  produced  a 
jarring  discord  in  me  who  was  putting  all  my 
faith  and  all  my  heart  as  well  as  my  brain,  into  the 
propagation  of  the  eternal  record  of  the  Eternal, 
just  now  in  ephemeral  Chicago.  To  be  sure  I 
never  failed  to  read  the  newspaper  with  diligence, 
for  its  own  sake  first,  it  being  the  moment's  world- 
bubble,  and  then  for  the  sake  of  the  reaction  from 
it,  which  always  tended  to  give  me  a  quick  set- 
back upon  my  own  true  calling. 

And  now  let  the  fact  be  duly  acknowledged  that 
I  was  not  alone  in  attempting  to  fix  some  per- 
manent literary  anchorage  into  the  tornado-whirl 
of  Chicago.  I  remember  the  efforts  of  my  soldier- 
friend,  General  N.  B.  Buford,  who  ten  years  before 
my  time  had  the  battle-courage  to  organize  a  huge 
philosophical  Society,  which  far  outstripped  in 
numbers  our  little  St.  Louis  affair,  symbolizing  in- 
deed the  two  cities.  For  it  had  three  hundred  mem- 
bers, as  he  figured  it,  when  he  called  me  to  address 
it  far  back  somewhere  in  the  seventies.  That  was 
my  first  public  lecture  of  the  kind  away  from  home. 
I  supposed  I  would  meet  a  dozen  or  two  people,  the 


THE  RENASCENCE  EVOLVED,  ETC.  403 

usual  size  of  our  St.  Louis  audience.  Imagine  my 
terror  when  I  had  to  face  three  hundred  Chicago 
philosophers,  twenty  times  as  many  as  I  was  in  the 
habit  of  seeing  at  our  meetings.  Thus  philosophy 
herself  was  for  a  short  time  enormously  Chicago- 
ized,  perhaps  two-thirds  of  the  membership  being 
women.  The  Society  did  not  last  long ;  I  could 
hardly  find  a  trace  of  it  when  I  went  back  to  Chi- 
cago in  1884.  And  my  good  friend,  the  General, 
had  also  vanished  beyond.  Seemingly  the  science  of 
the  Eternal  had  become  altogether  transitory  in 
Chicago,  taking  the  character  of  its  environment  as 
the  terrestrial  paradise  of  the  Ephemeral. 

In  this  connection  gratitude  requires  that  I 
should  mention  three  faithful  friends  of  the  cause, 
gentlemen  of  first  distinction  and  influence  in  the 
city.  The  two  best-known  clergymen  of  Chicago 
and  public-spirited  citizens  of  the  highest  charac- 
ter, Dr.  David  Swing,  and  Dr.  H.  W.  Thomas,  were 
always  ready  to  lend  us  aid  by  word  and  deed,  and 
even  by  lectures  before  our  Literary  Schools.  They 
have  passed  on,  but  Professor  Lewis  J.  Block  re- 
mains, distinguished  as  poet,  critic,  and  educator, 
and  specially  gifted  with  profound  insight  into 
philosophy.  I  never  failed  to  gain  new  light  and 
incentive  in  conversing  with  his  deeply  sympathetic 
personality. 

In  the  fall  of  1884  I  gave  my  first  course  of  talks 
on  Homer  to  a  small  miscellaneous  audience  in  a 
school-room  of  Chicago,  lasting  about  five  weeks. 
At  the  close  I  was  surprised  to  find  requests  for  a 


404    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

number  of  classes— all  that  I  could  attend  to — in 
the  several  Literary  Bibles.  These  classes  were 
scattered  over  the  city,  and  were  to  be  held  chiefly 
in  private  parlours.  What  could  be  the  source  of 
this  sudden  cultural  outburst  in  Chicago  ?  I  found 
that  most  of  the  promoters  were  people  who  had 
been  either  at  Concord  or  at  St.  Louis — in  the 
latter  case  they  were  chiefly  Kindergartners  who 
had  studied  with  Miss  Blow.  I  had  another  en- 
gagement in  Indiana,  but  I  promised  to  return  the 
following  year  which  I  did  with  the  result  that 
Chicago  became  my  center  of  propagation  for  quite 
twenty  years. 

When  I  came  back  and  resumed  the  classes  I 
found  an  interest  similar  to  that  in  St.  Louis  some 
five  years  before.  All  over  town  these  groups  kept 
springing  up,  and  asking  me  for  lessons  in  the 
Literary  Bibles.  I  was  puzzled  by  the  fact,  inas- 
much as  Chicago  acquaintances  had  repeatedly 
warned  me  that  no  such  thing  as  the  St.  Louis 
Movement  was  possible  or  even  advisable  in  their 
wild  and  whirling  town.  Of  course  there  were 
some  clubs  which  studied  Browning  for  instance, 
who  was  then  in  the  acme  of  his  vogue.  To-day's 
novelists  also  Chicago  might  take  in  small  quick 
doses,  but  I  was  told  that  it  wanted  "none  of  your 
old  Homer  or  medieval  Dante."  Still  I  found  re- 
sponses to  these  most  ancient  poets  in  most  modern 
Chicago,  which  by  report  would  contemptuously 
fling  under  the  hoofs  of  its  cattle  and  swine  at  the 


THE  RENASCENCE  EVOLVED,  ETC.  405 

slaughter-house  all  such  long-outlived  palaeo- 
graphs. 

In  the  great  migration  to  the  West  from  the 
East,  the  world  was  afloat  with  the  Sun's  course, 
and  dropped  along  its  path  a  line  of  floating  com- 
munities, many  of  which  have  disappeared,  while 
others,  the  most  of  them,  have  been  stabilized  into 
the  prescribed  communal  life  of  the  past.  Chicago 
was  their  best  representative,  and  has  preserved 
much  of  their  original  Western  character  of  daring 
initiative,  and  will  not  settle  down  into  quiescent 
tradition,  refusing  to  conform  its  activity  to  the 
transmitted  model  from  the  East.  In  a  sense  it  still 
keeps  on  migrating,  pioneering,  breaking  away  even 
from  its  own  prescription,  ever  re-making  itself  a 
new  town  on  some  new  frontier.  Tell  me,  I  would 
often  ask  of  my  self's  own  Sibyl,  what  has  ancient 
Homer  to  do  with  such  a  town  as  this  Chicago? 
Why  dare  you  try  to  bridge  over  what  Time  and 
Space,  Spirit  and  Speech  have  so  utterly  divorced  ? 
The  response  would  run :  ' '  That  is  just  Chicago  in 
quintessence:  to  dare  those  elemental  deities  of  Na- 
ture's separation,  Space  and  Time,  and  to  put 
them  to  flight  across  continents. ' ' 

Thus  I,  a  wee  vanishing  atom  myself,  made  the 
desperate  plunge  into  the  Chicago  maelstrom,  bear- 
ing under  my  arm  my  big  eternal  evangel,  nothing 
less  than  the  four  greatest,  most  enduring  books 
written  by  European  man.  At  first  I  startled  and 
shrank,  still  I  felt  the  secret  affinity,  and  so  with 
time  I  became  one  with  my  environment ;  I  turned 


406    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— FART  SECOND. 

vortical  like  Chicago  in  my  outer  activity,  while 
my  inner  remained  firmly  anchored  to  my  one 
creative  task. 

Having  taken  a  glimpse  of  external  tumultuous 
Chicago,  I  began  to  look  underneath  the  surface, 
and  there  I  soon  found  the  city-soul  in  a  deeply  re- 
sponsive agitation,  perchance  even  more  perturbed 
inwardly  than  outwardly,  spiritually  than  bodily. 
The  first  and  best  example  rises  now  before  me  in 
the  fact  that  sooner  or  later  I  came  upon  at  least  a 
dozen  new  religions,  which  were  claiming  to  be 
here  evolved  or  perchance  to  have  just  dropped 
from  Heaven  in  answer  to  the  crying  prayer  of 
the  place  and  the  time.  Certainly  they  were  all 
protests  against  the  transmitted  theology,  and 
waged  war  upon  prescription.  Therein  they  could 
touch  me  to  an  harmonious  thrill,  even  when  I  al- 
together disagreed  with  their  doctrines.  A  little 
investigation,  however,  showed  that  quite  all  these 
new  religions  were  mainly  reproductions  or  recru- 
descences of  old  Oriental  faiths.  The  Hindoo  God- 
consciousness  showed  a  strange  revival  right  in  the 
midst  of  the  grand  Chicago  Maya;  Buddhism  found 
followers,  the  new  Brahminism  under  the  name  of 
Brahmo-somaj  had  its  cult,  and  especially  Theos- 
ophy  reaped  no  small  harvest  after  the  seeding  of 
the  famous  Madam  Blavatzky,  whose  Isis  Unveiled 
I  once  found  Harris  deeply  pondering  and  propos- 
ing to  refute,  in  consequence  of  its  ravages  among 
his  friends,  chiefly  women.  An  American  convert  to 
Mahommedanism  came  among  us  and  preached  to 


THE  RENASCENCE  EVOLVED,  ETC.  407 

us  like  a  zealous  missionary  to  the  heathen,  though 
he  kept  silent  on  polygamy.  Marvelously  success- 
ful in  thrift,  in  numbers,  and  in  turmoil  was  the 
revival  of  the  old  Hebrew  Zion  by  John  Alexander 
Dowie,  who  within  a  block  of  my  lodging-house, 
proclaimed  himself  on  Michigan  Boulevard  in 
triumph  the  successor  of  Moses  and  David,  saying 
"I  am  a  theocrat!  away  with  your  democracy!" 
But  altogether  the  most  active  and  pervasive  reli- 
gious revolt  went  under  the  name  of  Christian 
Science,  avatar  of  the  returning  new  Christ,  now  a 
woman,  and  was  often  deemed  Mrs.  Eddy's  Re- 
formation of  Luther's  Reformation.  For  a  while 
all  the  Protestant  Churches  of  the  city  seemed 
tinged  with  it,  like  an  epidemic  it  spread  and 
raged,  everybody  took  to  healing  one's  self  and 
one  another.  An  imprudent  excellent  clergyman, 
an  acquaintance  of  mine,  dared  preach  a  sermon 
against  it,  which  was  his  last  from  that  pulpit  when 
he  found  the  bulk  of  his  congregation  preaching 
back  against  him.  The  universal  gift  of  healing 
played  havoc  with  the  regular  physicians ;  I  heard 
an  estimate  that  one-third  at  least  of  the  medical 
practice  of  Chicago  had  vanished.  One  of  my 
curious  experiences  was  that  some  experts  in  the 
new  doctrine  attended  my  lectures  on  Homer  and 
Shakespeare,  and  declared  repeatedly  that  they 
contained  good  Christian  Science  without  my  say- 
ing it  or  even  knowing  it.  This  occurred  so  often 
that  I  concluded  there  must  be  some  common  ele- 
ment between  us — what  ?  The  break  from  too  much 


408    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

tradition,  perchance.     Let  the  reader  be  his  own 
oracle  and  give  the  answer. 

Thus  all  Asia  in  its  highest  spiritual  contribu- 
tion to  humanity,  the  whole  Oriental  mind  with  its 
supreme  gift  of  the  great  world-religions — Chris- 
tian, Jewish,  Mahommedan,  Hindoo — seemed  to 
bubble  up  again  on  this  side  of  the  globe  in  that 
huge  vat  of  fermentation  called  Chicago,  and 
started  to  seething  with  a  fresh  creation  of  them- 
selves, usually  under  the  old  Asiatic  names  but 
sometimes  not,  in  this  newest  city  of  the  Occident. 
What  can  it  all  mean?  At  any  rate  the  psycholo- 
gist might  glimpse  in  the  phenomenon  the  soul's 
early  starting  of  its  last  and  largest  return  to  the 
Orient,,  to  the  original  home  of  our  civilized  God- 
consciousness,  and  might  mark  the  early  chaotic 
mutterings  and  struggles  of  the  coming  universal 
religion,  in  this  its  grand  Occidental  dip  backward 
into  its  first  creative  sources.  Only  in  Chicago  has 
ever  been  held  a  real  Parliament  of  Religions,  which 
took  place  during  her  World's  Fair,  and  which 
still  remains  a  striking  revelation  of  herself  in  this 
respect  as  well  as  a  mighty  prophecy,  not  yet  ful- 
filled, of  what  is  to  follow  after  the  political  Fed- 
eration of  the  Nations. 

So  I  flung  myself  with  a  shiver  of  terror,  yet  also 
with  a  certain  feeling  of  kinship,  into  this  vortex 
of  Chicago  life.  One  point  of  sympathy  I  may 
here  designate :  All  these  propagandists  of  new 
religions  in  one  way  or  other,  more  or  less  pro- 
foundly, sought  the   re-interpretation   and   recon- 


THE  RENASCENCE  EVOLVED,  ETC.  409 

struetion  of  the  old  Religions  Bibles  of  the  Orient, 
which  was  not  dissimilar  to  my  theme,  though  I 
clung  to  the  four  Literary  Bibles  of  Europe — old 
and  new — with  fresh  significances,  and  their  final 
co-ordination  into  one  Book  of  the  Ages. 

Undoubtedly  many  other  long  inherited  beliefs 
and  disciplines  were  boiling  in  that  Chicago  caul- 
dron, and  undergoing  some  kind  of  transformation. 
Philosophy,  Art,  and  especially  Education  were 
subjected  to  the  city's  dissolving  as  well  as  reno- 
vating process.  This  meant  not  so  much  the  de- 
struction as  the  re-construction  and  rejuvenescence 
of  all  ancient  Tradition,  sacred  and  secular — an  as- 
piration which  St.  Louis  once  owned  when  I  first 
knew  her,  but  which  she  had  at  this  time  quite 
lost — perchance  again  the  backstroke  of  her  Great 
Disillusion. 

Very  suggestive  of  the  new  social  and  spiritual 
Apocalypse,  and  also  deeply  motived  in  human  pro- 
gress were  these  fresh  young  Chicago  recurrences 
of  aged  Asia  and  Europe,  as  if  here  the  world  had 
begun  over  again  and  I  were  present  at  the  new 
Creation ;  or  at  least  as  if  History  had  started  on 
another  great  arc  of  the  total  cycle  of  man's  de- 
velopment. The  experience  of  this  original  proto- 
plasmic world-life  which  was  then  engendering  at 
Chicago,  and  in  which  I  profoundly  participated, 
became  for  me  the  supreme  discipline  of  that 
greater  Chicago  University  of  Civilization,  very  dif- 
ferent from,  yet  by  no  means  so  easily  discernible 
as  the  other  great  Chicago  University   (of  Rocke- 


410    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

feller)  dedicated  to  the  well-groomed  traditions  of 
time-honored  Learning — to  all  of  which  I  for  one 
insisted  upon  paying  due  obeisance,  though  not  a 
one-sided  devotion. 

Accordingly  I  feel  interested  enough  in  myself 
to  set  forth  a  somewhat  detailed  unfolding  of  this 
present  Epoch,  truly  the  central  one  of  my  entire 
life  in  years  and  also  the  busiest  one  in  labors,  as  it 
evolves  its  two  distinctive  strands,  theoretical  and 
practical,  or  of  inner  development  and  outer  propa- 
gation, and  so  brings  to  light  the  two  opposite  ele- 
ments, the  concentrated  and  the  discursive,  of  my 
double-tracked  existence. 


The  New  Mythical  Setting 

Not  long  after  I  had  started  upon  this  new 
Epoch  of  wandering  and  of  seed-sowing,  I  became 
dimly  aware  of  a  very  subtle  change  which  was 
slowly  entering  and  transforming  my  imaginative 
life.  For  my  conscious  activity  lay  embosomed  as 
it  were,  in  a  penumbra  of  ever-flashing  imagery 
which  would  stream  out  from  unconscious  depths 
and  frequently,  but  not  always,  shape  itself  into 
prose  and  verse.  Such  an  elusive  nebulous  world  of 
Phantasy  envelops  us  all,  though  few  probably  de- 
velop it  into  an  integral  part  of  their  larger  exist- 
ence. Now  this  is  what  I  may  here  call  life's  myth- 
ical setting  or  frame-work,  which  often  changes 


THE  NEW  MYTHICAL  SETTING.  4H 

along  with  the  man's  spiritual  mutations.     Such 
at  least  was  the  case  with  me  at  the  present  time. 

The  reader  will  recollect  that  everywhere  in  the 
previous  Epoch  my  environment  was  Hellas,  her 
works  and  her  spirit.  My  quest  strove  to  assimilate 
and  to  reproduce  both  in  myself  and  in  outward 
forms  the  antique  Greek  world,  hence  that  time  was 
especially  named  my  Classical  Renascence.  I  found 
that  on  all  sides  the  Greco-Roman  life  with  its 
civilization  was  enwrapped  in  the  plastic  folds  of 
Greek  Mythology,  from  which  evolved  not  only 
religion,  but  poetry,  art,  even  history,  as  we  may 
still  observe  in  the  respective  works  of  Homer, 
Phidias,  Herodotus.  Thus  all  Classical  expression 
was  primarily  mythical,  unfolding  out  of  that  won- 
derful Greek  Mythus,  which  I  tried  to  re-live  and 
to  re-create  for  so  many  years.  Let  me  instance 
again  the  tale  of  Iphigenia,  which  traveled  at  my 
side  during  my  whole  European  journey  and  back 
home,  till  I  could  ban  it  out  of  me  into  expression 
and  thus  rid  me  of  its  haunting  presence. 

But  now  behold  the  unique  metamorphosis  in  my- 
self most  surprising  to  myself!  A  new  Mythus, 
the  American  one,  of  the  Western  frontier,  begins 
to  insinuate  itself  into  and  even  underneath  that 
old  Greek  one,  and  to  take  its  place  in  the  back- 
ground of  my  consciousness,  being  native  to  my 
birth-soil  and  not  transmitted  from  hoar  antiquity. 
I  refused  to  believe  my  own  psychology  at  first,  and 
I  revolted  at  the  change.  But  I  could  not  help  my- 
self, a  deeper  and  more  compelling  stage  of  my 
evolution  had  set  in,  something  mightier  than  my 


412    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

conscious  pleasure  or  purpose.  The  lofty  Olympian 
world  with  its  Gods  and  Demigods  was  impercept- 
ibly transmuted  into  the  life  and  legend  of  the 
humble  vagabond,  Johnny  Appleseed,  who  now  be- 
came, as  it  were,  my  spirit's  exemplar  and  my 
mythical  hero,  at  the  start  in  spite  of  myself.  Is 
not  the  Christ-tale  something  similar  in  form,  and 
often  productive  of  a  similar  transformation  ? 

Such,  then,  was  the  most  searching  and  distinc- 
tive prognostic  of  the  new  Epoch.  But  who  was  this 
Johnny  Appleseed?  A  wanderer  and  a  seed-sower 
through  the  Mississippi  Valley,  or  a  considerable 
part  thereof ;  yet  he  had  an  idea  in  his  head  which 
he  carried  over  into  life  quite  at  the  cost  of  life, 
thus  making  himself  the  ideal  of  all  idealists,  and 
reducing  the  three  fates  of  existence,  food  raiment, 
and  shelter,  to  their  lowest  terms — truly  a  new- 
world  fate-compeller.  He  grew  to  be  for  the  people 
a  mythical  character,  and  so  he  remains  to  me ; 
still  he  was  an  historic  person  with  a  brief 
biography,  to  whom  a  monument  has  been  erected 
at  Mansfield,  Ohio,  on  which  we  may  read  the  fol- 
lowing inscription:  "To  the  memory  of  John 
Chapman,  best  known  as  Johnny  Appleseed, 
Pioneer  Nurseryman  of  Richland  County  from  1810 
to  1830." 

This  John  Chapman  was  born  in  New  England, 
but  as  a  young  man  migrated  to  the  West,  and  the 
first  report  of  him  has  been  transmitted  that  he  was 
seen  about  the  year  1800  floating  down  the  Ohio 
river,  in  charge  of  two  canoes  lashed  together  and 


THE  NEW  MYTHICAL  SETTING.  413 

loaded  with  sacks  of  appleseeds  for  the  planting 
of  nurseries  on  favorable  spots  in  advance  of  civili- 
zation, which  was  now  seeking  a  new  home  in  the 
wild  North-Western  Territory.  Thus  every  hardy 
pioneer,  migrating  with  his  family,  would  find  a 
young  orchard  already  awaiting  him  wherever  he 
might  settle  in  the  wilderness.  Such  was  apostolic 
John  Chapman's  general  idea  or  gospel:  service 
for  the  ever-advancing  immigrant,  bearer  of  the 
oncoming  civilized  order.  It  is  added  that  he  was 
a  vegetarian,  his  chief  food  being  the  berries,  nuts, 
and  fruits  of  Nature  along  with  an  occasional  hand- 
ful of  Western  cornmeal.  He  went  bare-footed  win- 
ter and  summer,  while  his  clothing  was  of  the 
rudest  make.  (More  about  the  historic  Johnny 
Appleseed  in  my  Writer  of  Books,  Appendix.) 

Such  may  be  deemed  the  primitive  real  kernel  of 
this  Mythus  of  Migration,  which  wreathes  around 
Johnny  Appleseed,  and  which  the  people  them- 
selves made  and  named — the  only  original  Ameri- 
can Mythus  that  I  know  of,  with  the  possible  ex- 
ception of  Uncle  Remus.  To  be  sure,  the  seedlings 
of  many  other  legends  have  been  imported  and  even 
planted  in  the  soil  here,  where  they  have  not  failed 
to  sprout  and  bloom.  But  the  story  of  Johnny  Ap- 
pleseed is  autochthonous,  though  it  may  have  anal- 
ogues in  other  parts  of  the  earth.  Like  that  of 
Hercules  and  of  Theseus  in  Greek  fable,  it  has  a 
unique  historic  personality  as  its  creative  center, 
from  which  it  continues  to  grow  layer  by  layer, 
each  generation  and  often  each  locality  adding  its 


414    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

legendary  anecdote.  So  I  have  seen  in  my  life- 
time what  may  yet  be  called  the  Mythus  of  Abra- 
ham Lincoln  augmenting  itself,  story  upon  story, 
till  its  material  promises  to  outstrip  the  man's 
actual  biography,  both  in  interest  and  magnitude. 
Thus  the  people  mythologize  their  true  heroes, 
even  the  American  people  do  so,  who  are  on  the 
whole  not  much  addicted  to  Mythology. 

The  doings  of  Appleseed  I  have  heard  celebrated 
in  places  where  he  could  never  have  been,  for  the 
Mythus  universalizes  itself  over  Space  and  Time. 
The  date  and  locality  of  his  death  have  been  care- 
fully hunted  up  and  specified  by  investigation ;  yet 
his  grave  has  been  pointed  out  to  me  in  different 
spots  hundreds  of  miles  apart,  during  the  course 
my  own  wanderings  as  lecturer  also  planting  (if 
you  will  so  construe  it)  my  appleseeds. 

I  was  nine  or  ten  years  old  when  I  first  read  at 
home  in  a  local  book  a  brief  account  of  Johnny 
Appleseed,  and  his  story  never  left  me.  In  fact 
it  would  rise  to  mind  of  its  own  accord,  now  and 
then,  during  all  my  young-manhood ;  but  being  un- 
used by  me  either  in  life  or  in  writing,  it  would 
quietly  sink  back  into  its  former  subliminal  depths. 
I  heard  of  the  peculiarities  of  Johnny  Appleseed 
from  the  people  of  my  native  town  in  Ohio,  which 
was  only  a  few  miles  from  Mansfield,  once  Apple- 
seed's  home,  and  his  monument's  own  town.  It  is 
my  opinion  that  the  old  orchard  on  my  grand- 
father's  farm  originated  from  one  of  Appleseed 's 
nurseries.     And  thus  in  my  boyhood  I  ate  of  his 


THE  NEW  MYTHICAL  SETTING.  415 

apples,  the  real  fruit  of  his  service.  But  more 
deeply  I  partook  of  his  ideal  legend,  which  lay  un- 
consciously fermenting  in  me,  and  imparting  its 
education  to  my  unrisen  Self.  Thus  a  native 
Mythus  was  taking  part  in  my  training,  and  to  a 
small  degree  in  that  of  my  little  community,  alto- 
gether in  spite  of  ourselves,  for  openly  we  ridiculed 
it  while  secretly  we  took  it  to  our  hearts,  and  cher- 
ished it  unforgotten.  Indeed  the  ultimate  function 
of  the  Mythus  in  all  its  shapes — legend,  fairy-tale, 
folk-lore — is  that  it  be  educative  of  the  people  in 
the  people's  own  form,  whence  it  unfolds  into  the 
higher  forms  of  poetry,  art,  literature,  and  culture 
generally.  I  hold  that  the  first  and  greatest  edu- 
cator of  the  Greek  people  to  its  transcendent  gifts 
and  works  was  that  unique  Greek  Mythology, 
genetic  back-ground  of  the  Greek  world,  and  signifi- 
cant even  to-day  as  educative.  So  at  least  I  felt 
when  I  tramped  through  Greece  to  catch  it  up  from 
its  creative  living  well-head,  and  not  from  books, 
which  are  necessarily  desiccated,  yet  very  neces- 
sary. Not  without  an  urgent  need  of  the  time's 
training  has  there  taken  place  a  revival  of  My- 
thology, and  especially  of  Greek  Mythology,  v 
has  now  become  a  study  in  many  schools,  and  is 
again  being  told  to  little  children,  of  course  with 
due  selection  and  modification  and  often  I 
production. 

Thus  I  had  my  little  part  in  a  fresh  lifting  c  £  the 
race's  mythical  treasures,  and  in  restoring  the] 
their  primordial  educative  value.    My  special  prae- 


416    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

tical  field  in  this  business  I  found  in  the  Kinder- 
garten with  its  youngest  beginners  in  schooling. 
But  I  failed  not  to  stress  the  Mythus  which  under- 
lay and  germinally  created  each  of  the  Literary 
Bibles,  the  supreme  products  of  human  genius.  So, 
for  me  the  Mythus  with  its  primitive  form  of  im- 
aginative expression  overarched  and  integrated  the 
beginning  and  end  of  man's  grand  discipline  of 
education,  from  the  little  Kindergarten  to  the 
loftiest  Poem,  supreme  work  of  the  University  of 
Civilization.  , 

In  Johnny  Appleseed  my  wandering  and  dis- 
semination had  found  and  stirred  the  far-down  ele- 
mental Mythus  lurking  from  earliest  youth  in  my 
dark  underself,  and  now  bubbling  up  to  the  light 
as  the  vehicle  of  my  fresh  self-expression,  in  both 
prose  and  verse,  during  the  coming  Epoch.  As  al- 
ready indicated,  this  juvenile  Mythus,  so  I  may  call 
it,  now  springs  forth  full-grown  after  a  long  but 
ever- fermenting  subsidence,  and  actually  tackles  my 
most  cherished  G-reek  Mythus,  flinging  the  same 
underneath  itself  and  marching  triumphantly 
ahead  on  its  new  career.  Still  we  must  not  forget 
that  the  old  Greek  world,  with  its  vast  rich  experi- 
ence was  not  destroyed  or  lost,  but  was  gratefully 
embraced  and  borne  along  in  this  young  ebullient 
spirit  of  the  time  and  country. 

In  myself  the  change  often  seethed  up  before  me 
as  a  startling  transformation.  From  the  high  aris- 
tocratic antique  to  the  humble  democratic  modern, 
from  the  lofty  Heroes  and  Demigods  to  lowly  bare- 


THE  NEW  MYTHICAL  SETTING.  417 

footed  Johnny  Appleseed,  from  the  ideally  beauti- 
ful plastic  form  and  classic  drapery  of  the  Greeks 
to  the  savagely  blanketed  and  feathered  figure  of 
the  Indians  ( Appleseed 's  companions  often),  from 
the  grandiose  sea-swell  of  the  Homeric  hexameter 
to  the  petty  bits  of  the  jingling  doggerel — such  was 
at  times  the  shivering  transition,  yet  supernally 
ordered  for  my  completer  self-hood,  as  I  have  to  be- 
lieve, now  looking  backward. 

Here  I  may  add  that  the  Mythus  of  Johnny 
Appleseed,  as  I  prefer  to  designate  it,  did  not  cease, 
with  this  Epoch  of  a  dozen  years,  its  mythical  ac- 
companiment to  my  life.  Later  I  shall  recount  how 
'Y;  quite  suddenly  gushed  up  again  from  its  sub- 
conscious sources  even  in  my  advanced  age,  and  in- 
sisted upon  a  fresh  renascence.  Thus  it  attuned 
all  my  days  to  an  undertone  of  popular  legend 
which  at  due  periods  would  break  into  utterance 
as  an  insuppressible  element  of  my  total  self-ex- 
pression. In  my  youth  it  lay  implicit,  doubtless 
ripening ;  but  in  my  middle  life  it  became  explicit, 
openly  active,  quite  supplanting  my  previous 
Classicism.  But  behold  it  again  now  in  my  hoar 
senescence — wait,  for  this  is  not  yet  past. 

In  the  foregoing  account  I  have  tried  to  give  a 
glimpse  of  what  was  darkly  and  fitfully  streaming 
through  my  underworld,  where  the  mythical  ele- 
ment had  its  sway  and  function,  for  I  believe  it  to 
have  been  one  of  my  best  and  most  congenial 
teachers,  holding  its  school  in  the  unconscious 
lower  currents  of  my  soul's  deep  sea.    But  my  con- 


418    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

scious,  unmythical  self  was  chiefly  busy  with  the 
Literary  Bibles,  which  had  also  their  mythical  sub- 
structure of  prime  significance,  as  I  have  always 
tried  to  set  forth  with  due  emphasis.  At  this  more 
definite,  better-lighted  objective  we  may  next  take 
a  glance. 

II 

The  Double  Transfer 

The  present  Epoch  is  marked  at  its  opening  by 
two  significant  changes  of  locality:  from  St.  Louis 
and  from  Concord  to  Chicago.  The  latter  city  is 
to  show  itself  the  new  center  of  the  Movement,  as 
far  as  this  continues  to  run  on  my  lines  of  work. 
With  such  a  double  shifting  of  my  life-scene  is  also 
connected  a  fresh  stage  of  my  development. 

That  which  I  had  won  and  wrought  out  to  a  cer- 
tain completeness  I  was  to  transplant  to  a  different 
soil.  For  Chicago  was  then  bursting  forth  in  the 
riotous  exuberance  of  early  gigantic  youth,  crude 
but  enormously  energetic;  while  St.  Louis  seemed 
to  be  collapsing  into  a  premature  old-age,  disap- 
pointed, deeply  disillusioned  of  life  already.  The 
difference  in  the  mood  of  the  two  cities  seemed  to 
suggest  that  between  the  rising  and  the  setting 
sun.  Undoubtedly  there  was  still  much  activity  in 
St.  Louis,  mental  and  commercial;  but  we  all  felt 
a  settled  something  clogging  her  soul,  a  despairful 
brooding  over  the  Great  Disillusion.  As  for  me 
personally,  the  change  meant  a  new  freedom,  a  get- 
ting rid  of  some  old  fetters  which  hampered  my 


THE  DOUBLE  TRANSFER.  419 

spirit's  native  evolution.  In  the  first  place  I  wished 
to  take  breath  outside  of  the  Hegelian  atmosphere 
which  had  become  a  kind  of  tradition,  and  hence 
a  smothering  circumscription  of  me  in  St.  Louis. 
Then  friction  and  possible  clash  with  Miss  Blow's 
literary  leadership  I  would  avoid  as  something  not 
only  unpleasant  but  injurious  to  both  sides,  and  to 
the  general  cause.  So  I  left  the  old  field  to  her 
alone,  while  I  turned  to  the  cultivation  of  fresh 
territory,  which  was  inviting  me  with  alluring  out- 
looks upon  the  future. 

From  Concord  also  I  became  totally  weaned  after 
the  session  of  1885,  during  whose  time  there  dawned 
upon  me  some  faint  hope  of  transferring  to  the 
West  the  Literary  School,  which  for  me  had  dis- 
tinctly evolved  out  of  the  Philosophical  School,  and 
gave  promise  of  being  its  rightful  successor.  And 
now  dropped  down  upon  my  immature  though 
budding  plan  an  auspicious  conjuncture  which 
caused  it  to  ripen  at  once.  I  received  a  letter  from 
a  lady  who  had  attended  the  Goethe  School  at  Con- 
cord in  1885,  suggesting  a  project  for  a  similar 
course  of  lectures  and  discussions  on  the  great  Ger- 
man poet  in  the  strongly  German  and  Germanized 
city  of  Milwaukee. 

On  the  moment  I  fell  in  with  the  proposition, 
deeming  it  a  happy  omen  sent  of  the  Gods,  and  I 
offered  to  do  my  part  toward  carrying  it  out ;  but  I 
emphasized  in  my  answer  that  there  must  be  a 
previous  course  of  reading  and  study  in  prepara- 
tion for  such  a  considerable  work.     Accordingly 


420    THE  'ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

arrangements  were  made  to  start  some  classes  in 
the  poet's  Faust,  of  which  I  was  to  be  the  in- 
structor. Already  I  had  resolved  to  locate  in  Chi- 
cago, from  which  I  could  take  a  rapid  ride  to  Mil- 
waukee by  rail  at  almost  any  hour  of  the  day. 
Thus  for  several  months  the  town  was  not  allowed 
to  forget  the  extraordinary  event  in  prospect,  since 
it  was  trumpeted  by  the  local  press  throughout 
"Wisconsin. 

In  those  days  Milwaukee  was  already  famous  for 
its  beer,  bubbling  up  perchance  from  its  deep  Teu- 
tonic foundations,  and  foaming  out  over  the  spa- 
cious West.  I  had  known  the  city  as  celebrated 
also  for  its  German  culture  generally,  since  I  had 
heard  it  called  "the  German  Athens  of  America" 
even  in  jealously  German  St.  Louis.  Its  recent  dis- 
tinction of  being  the  Western  fortress  of  socialism 
had  not  at  that  time  been  won,  though  it  was 
doubtless  on  the  way.  But  beer  and  culture,  both 
just  now  under  such  decided  eclipse,  were  then 
strongly  in  evidence,  and  I  took  pleasure  in  sip- 
ping modestly  of  both,  as  occasion  might  offer.  On 
the  whole,  I  never  heard  the  German  language 
spoken  so  generally  along  the  streets  in  any  other 
of  the  larger  cities  of  America.  Still  my  sponsors 
were  almost  wholly  Americans,  whose  little  group 
was  genteelly  housed  in  the  heart  of  the  city,  which 
seemed  buoyantly  tossing  on  the  ripples  of  Lake 
Michigan. 

Among  the  pleasant  memories  of  Milwaukee  I 
recall  especially  the  extraordinary  number  of  poets, 


THE  DOUBLE  TRANSFER.  421 

singing  in  English  and  also  in  German  and  then 
in  both  tongues  together,  who  appeared  to  spring 
out  of  her  soil  everywhere  at  the  mere  sound  of  a 
versicle.  In  all  my  travels  I  do  not  remember  me 
ever  to  have  poured  out  so  many  of  my  own  lines 
on  little  coteries  of  patient  listeners,  from  whom 
usually  would  fly  back  at  me  a  poetical  tit-for-tat 
in  response  or  possibly  in  revenge.  I  certainly  en- 
joyed this  new  tournament  of  verse,  truly  a  spon- 
taneous eisteddfod  of  Wisconsin  bards  preluding 
their  strains  along  the  shores  of  Lake  Michigan,  to 
whose  melodious  volume  I  contributed  especially 
my  classic  elegiacs  interspersed  with  memories  of 
the  trip  to  Hellas.  Thus  quite  an  electric  spirt 
of  the  Greek  Renascence  shot  up  of  its  own  vivid 
accord  outside  of  the  Goethe  Classes,  yet  in  an 
harmonious  by-play  with  them,  which  had  their 
object  and  fulfillment  in  the  coming  Goethe  School. 
This  finally  opened  August  23d,  1886,  with  an 
address  from  its  President,  a  well-known  citizen  of 
Milwaukee,  before  a  large  and  much-expecting  au- 
dience, and  continued  for  one  week,  two  lectures  a 
day,  morning  and  evening,  each  lecture  about  an 
hour  long,  followed  by  a  general  discussion.  The 
most  distinguished  man  on  the  list  of  lecturers  was 
Dr.  W.  T.  Harris,  formerly  of  St.  Louis,  but  now  of 
Concord.  He  at  first  rather  hesitated  about  accept- 
ing the  invitation  of  the  Committee,  but  I  by  a  per- 
sonal letter  urged  him  strongly  to  give  his  powerful 
aid  to  this  new  stride  of  our  St.  Louis  Movement, 
which  was  also  a  kind  of  young  branching-out  of 


422    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

the  Concord  School  to  the  West,  when  it  seemed 
drooping  in  the  East.    He  had  just  concluded  the 
summer's  Dante  School  at  Concord,  and  felt  very- 
tired,  as  usual;  but,  what  was  unusual,  he  showed 
no  little   irritation   at  certain  things   which  had 
taken  place  during  that  session.    Still  he  packed  up 
and  came,  to  my  great  relief ;  for  at  Milwaukee  the 
management  seemed  to  be  lapsing  toward  confusion 
if  not  failure,  and  the  School  had  gone  too  far  to 
be  countermanded.     Harris,  arriving,  soon  saw  the 
situation,  and  valiantly  pulled  himself  together  and 
also  pulled  the  lagging  School  along  with  himself 
to  a  successful  close.    I  think  he  never  showed  him- 
self more  masterful,  especially  in  the  discussions, 
which   were   often  better  than  the  lectures,  con- 
spicuously so  when  he  was  roused  to  the  fighting- 
point.    And  certain  occurrences  at  Milwaukee  had 
roiled  him  up  from  the  bottom,  not  to  wrath  but 
to  supreme  exertion.    Hence  he  took  possession  of 
the  School,  not  the  official  but  the  intellectual,  con- 
trolled it,  and  steered  it  safely,  I  may  say  triumph- 
antly, into  port.     I  never  saw  him  do  so  complete 
a  deed,  even  at  Concord.     He  was  not  without  his 
ambitions,  and  when  he  looked  into  the  face  of  that 
large  and  notable  audience,  seven  or  eight  times 
larger  than   the   average   attendance   at  his   own 
School  of  Philosophy,  he  summoned  all  his  reserve 
power,  of  which  he  had  no  small  store,  and  rose  vic- 
toriously equal  to  the  occasion.     As  for  me  I  was 
on  hand  every  time  and  spoke  my  part  in  lecture, 
discussion,  and  even  in  verse,  but  I  had  emphatic 


THE  DOUBLE  TRANSFER.  423 

reasons  for  wishing  Harris  to  take  his  place  to  the 
fore,  especially  after  I  had  prepared  the  ground 
for  the  School,  and  in  that  task  had  harvested  a 
good  ripe  crop  of  disagreeable  experiences  of  peo- 
ple and  of  circumstances.  So  I  had  already  en- 
joyed honor  enough  for  once,  and  very  willingly  al- 
lowed him  to  take  his  share. 

Still  the  supreme  interest  of  the  whole  Milwaukee 
affair  centered  for  me  in  the  phenomenal  presence 
of  Brockmeyer,  his  first  and  last  appearance  at  any 
of  our  Schools  either  in  the  East  or  West.  Great 
was  my  surprise  when  I  read  his  name  as  one  of 
the  lecturers  on  the  first  program.  I  was  not  even 
asked  about  his  selection  for  such  a  place.  The 
management  of  its  own  accord  had  written  to  him, 
obtained  his  consent,  received  the  title  of  his  sub- 
ject, printed  it  and  advertised  it  in  large  letters 
when  it  foil  under  my  eye.  As  far  as  publicity 
could  go,  he  was  made  in  advance  the  cynosure  of 
the  School's  highest  expectations,  being  hailed  not 
only  the  Governor,  but  the  Philosopher  Brock- 
meyer. 

And  in  fact  such  was  his  true  place.  I  have  al- 
ready declared  often  enough  that  his  was  the 
original  creative  spirit  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement, 
and  I  know  that  especially  his  early  lectures  on 
Faust  in  St.  Louis  more  than  twenty  years  before, 
had  been  the  first  germ  of  this  and  of  all  our 
Goethe  Schools,  indeed  of  all  our  Literary  Schools 
both  now  and  hereafter.  To  be  sure,  Brockmeyer 
had  never  unfolded  that  germ  to  maturity  in  him- 


424    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

self  or  in  his  environing  constituency ;  he  had  aban- 
doned it  for  a  far  lesser  worth,  in  my  judgment,  and 
his  small  but  very  fecund  bantling  was  picked  up, 
nursed,  and  developed  to  its  complete  stature  by 
other  hands.  And  now  after  all  these  years  he  is  to 
visit  in  a  strange  city  his  own  barely  recognizable 
child,  large  and  robust,  but  hardly  yet  full-grown. 
What  will  be  his  new  attitude  toward  it,  toward  us, 
and  especially  toward  his  present  audience,  very 
different  from  the  little  knot  of  us  who  used  to  as- 
semble about  him  in  his  little  law-office,  redolent 
with  tobacco-smoke  and  not  wholly  free  of  a  mis- 
cellaneous litter  on  the  table  and  on  the  floor?  So 
I  queried  myself,  and  I  may  say  that  Harris  ap- 
peared more  astonished  and  even  more  perplexed 
than  I  was,  and  shook  his  head  at  me  in  a  letter  all 
the  way  from  Concord,  though  I  was  not  to  blame, 
which  fact  he  soon  found  out.  As  already  stated, 
he  had  never  dared  invite  to  the  Concord  School  of 
Philosophy  the  philosophic  father  of  himself  and  of 
the  St.  Louis  Movement. 

Let  it  be  said,  however,  with  emphasis  that 
Harris  never  failed  to  give  ample  credit  in  print 
and  talk  to  Brockmeyer's  genius,  and  to  assign  him 
his  right  place  in  the  work.  Lest  the  reader  may 
think  that  I  stand  alone  in  my  exalted  opinion  of 
our  St.  Louis  philosopher,  I  shall  cite  some  deliber- 
ate sentences  of  Harris  written  many  years  after 
he  had  quit  our  city:  "Mr.  Brockmeyer  whose  ac- 
quaintance I  had  made  in  1858,  is,  and  was  even  at 
that  time,  a  thinker  of  the  same  order  of  mind  as 


THE  DOUBLE  TRANSFER.  425 

Hegel,  and  before  reading  him  had  divined  Hegel's 
chief  ideas" — which  means  the  highest  praise  Har- 
ris could  give  to  mortal  man.  But  philosophy  was 
not  the  thinker's  only  gift,  as  Harris  indicates  in 
the  following  extract :  ' '  Mr.  B-ockmeyer  's  deep  in- 
sights and  his  poetic  power  of  setting  them  forth 
with  symbols  and  imagery,  furnished  me  and  my 
friends  of  those  early  years  all  of  our  outside  stim- 
ulus in  the  study  of  German  philosophy."  That  is, 
our  philosopher  was  also  a  poet,  though  not  in  form 
realized.  Still  further:  "He  impressed  us  with 
the  practicality  of  philosophy.  Even  the  hunting 
of  wild  turkeys  or  squirrels  was  the  occasion  for 
the  use  of  philosophy,"  which  thus  became  in  his 
hands  "the  most  practical  of  all  species  of  knowl- 
edge. ' '  Harris  goes  on  to  say  how  it  was  applied  to 
pedagogy,  to  politics  and  law,  also  to  literature  and 
art,  of  which  a  sample  might  be  found  in  the  treat- 
ment of  the  Literary  Bibles.  (See  Hegel's  Logic 
by  Harris,  Preface,  pp.  12,  13,  published  in  1890.) 
Personally  I  had  seen  little  of  Brockmeyer  for  a 
dozen  years  or  more,  during  which  his  political 
career  had  budded,  bloomed,  and  ended  with  a 
sudden  close  if  not  collapse,  of  which  the  real  causes 
he  never  directly  told  me,  drowning  them  in  a  dis- 
illusioned silence,  though  he  could  not  help  letting 
the  bottom  of  his  heart  be  seen  indirectly  in  many 
a  passing  stroke  of  disappointment.  A  deep  poli- 
tical estrangement  overcame  him  so  that  he  again 
took  flight  from  civilized  life,  for  he  had  already 
done  the  same  once  before  if  not  twice.    The  date 


426   THE  sf-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

of  this  revolutionary  shake-up  in  his  career  I  once 
heard  him  give  with  pathetic  emphasis:  "In  1880, 
when  I  quit  Missouri  politics,  I  was  the  first  public 
man  in  the  state."  Thus  he  spoke  with  a  note  of 
a  great  disillusion,  and  at  the  same  time  with  a 
stress  of  self-appreciation,  in  which  he  was  never 
lacking.  His  excuse,  external  I  think,  was  that  he 
must  now  do  something  to  make  money  for  his  fam- 
ily. He  became  an  attorney  for  the  Gould  System 
of  Railroads,  and  his  chief  business  was  to  look 
after  the  Missouri  Legislature — an  employment 
which  certainly  brought  him  no  increase  of  reputa- 
tion, though  he  warmly  defended  himself  as  lobby- 
ist. This  side  of  his  life  was  unknown  to  me,  ex- 
cept as  he  reported  it,  and  it  rather  repelled  me  in 
spite  of  the  bright,  humorous,  fantastical  descrip- 
tions of  his  exploits  as  the  cunning  Reynard  among 
Missouri  politicians.  Still  he  was  not  shifty  enough 
to  bring  the  leaders  of  his  party  to  promote  him  to 
the  United  States  Senatorship  when  he  had  fairly 
won  it  by  his  long  service  to  party  and  to  public, 
and  by  his  supremacy  of  talent.  I  hold  that  he  was 
correct  in  deeming  himself  then  the  first  public  man 
of  the  state,  for  assuredly  he  had  no  signal  com- 
petition in  the  line  of  statesmanship  during  those 
years.  The  first  man  in  ability  certainly,  but  cer- 
tainly not  in  availability — that  was  his  situation 
everywhere,  political  and  also  philosophical,  in  Mis- 
souri and  in  Milwaukee  as  well — the  genius  un- 
realized, supremely  endowed,  yet  overborne  with 
the  fatuous  gift  of  always  undoing  his  own  great- 


THE  DOUBLE  TRANSFER.  427 

ness  often  on  the  spot,  wherein  lay  his  ever-re- 
curring set-back  and  self-nullification  past,  present, 
and  future. 

So  it  comes  that  Brockmeyer  appeared  as  a 
philosophic  representative  not  so  much  from  St. 
Louis  as  from  the  Indian  Territory,  whither  he  had 
betaken  himself  in  his  profound  alienation  of  spirit. 
He  had  been  living  now  for  several  years  among 
the  American  aborigenes,  with  occasional  visits  to 
his  St.  Louis  family  and  to  the  Missouri  Legisla- 
ture. Moreover  he  sought  to  take  up  into  his  own 
the  Indian  consciousness  itself,  and  to  assimilate 
its  political  and  social  institutions,  upon  whose  ex- 
cellences he  proposed  to  write  a  philosophic  treatise 
of  which  he  once  read  me  a  few  fragments.  Indeed 
he  would  scatter  through  his  talk  now  and  then 
some  Creek-Indian  expressions  to  designate  certain 
peculiar  tribal  matters  or  relations  whose  names  he 
claimed  had  no  equivalent  in  English.  For  ex- 
ample, I  still  can  recall,  along  with  his  pointed 
gesture  and  high-keyed  voice,  the  strange  word 
tustanucca,  so  my  memory  spells  it  phonetically, 
into  which  he  poured  some  unique  Creek  (not 
Greek)  philosophy.  He  never  printed,  probably 
never  completed  his  book,  which  in  such  case  re- 
mained an  unfinishable  Titanic  torso,  like  his  other 
works,  like  himself. 

I  was  glad  to  see  Brockmeyer  come  to  the  Mil- 
waukee School,  but  also  glad  that  I  was  not  the 
personal  cause  of  his  coming.  I  wished  to  watch 
him  tested  in  this  new  field,  for  I  was  well  aware 


428   TEE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

of  his  unexpected  possibilities  in  general ;  but  now, 
especially  in  his  present  aboriginal  mood,  I  had  an 
uncanny  presentiment  that  he  might  turn  a  very 
unconventional  somersault  right  in  the  presence  of 
fastidious  Lady  Convention  herself.  I  immediately 
called  on  my  old  friend,  when  I  heard  of  his  ar- 
rival, at  his  hotel,  the  best  then  in  town,  the  Plank- 
ington — for  him  a  somewhat  aristocratic  stroke  at 
the  start.  First,  he  refused  emphatically  to  be  en- 
tertained by  any  citizen,  as  were  the  rest  of  us  lec- 
turers. Then  he  rejected  rather  haughtily,  it 
seemed  to  me,  all  remuneration  for  his  services  at 
the  School,  and  even  insisted  upon  paying  his  own 
hotel  bill,  though  there  was  a  large  over-plus  of 
funds — a  state  of  finance  quite  opposite  to  that  of 
Concord.  Thus  from  the  outset  Brockmeyer  ap- 
peared to  take  a  lofty  position  of  independent 
aloofness  from  the  School's  other  people,  myself 
and  Harris  included.  Not  without  purpose  had  he 
traveled  all  the  way  from  Muscogee,  the  Creek 
Capital  in  the  heart  of  the  Indian  Territory,  back 
to  a  civilized  community  with  his  new  message. 

In  his  attitude  at  Milwaukee,  Brockmeyer  pro- 
ceeded to  exemplify  his  flight  from  society  by  his 
disregard  of  the  usual  social  conventions.  Almost 
savagely  free  he  vindicated  himself  in  his  new  free- 
dom. He  delivered  his  address  with  what  may  be 
called  a  backwoods  informality  of  speech  and  man- 
ner which  stamped  him  at  once  as  original,  if  not 
aboriginal.  The  result  was  at  first  a  shock  in  his 
refined  audience,  then  a  subdued  titter,  and  after- 


THE  DOUBLE  TRANSFER.  429 

wards  a  tidal  wave  of  gossip  through  the  town. 
How  shall  we  construe  his  conduct  ?  I  believe  that 
in  it  lay  a  considerable  amount  of  downright  inten- 
tion. For  Brockmeyer  had  lived  in  the  South,  espe- 
cially in  Kentucky,  during  his  younger  days,  and 
he  claimed  to  be  an  adept  in  all  the  Southern  cour- 
tesies when  he  chose.  But  now  he  did  not  choose, 
or  rather  chose  the  opposite — why?  I  thought  I 
detected  a  spice  of  malice  in  his  criticisms ;  his  old 
philosophic  friends  had  gone  on  without  him ;  Con- 
cord, though  Harris  his  nearest  disciple  was  there 
in  the  lead,  had  neglected  him ;  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment for  years  had  forged  ahead  and  left  him  out. 
Chiefly,  however,  his  political  disappointment  had 
engendered  in  him  a  spite  against  civilization  it- 
self and  its  ways,  and  had  driven  him  back  to  and 
even  over  its  frontier,  where  he  planted  himself 
squarely  against  it  in  a  sort  of  defiance.  The  sub- 
ject of  the  lecture  was  Faust,  and  I  thought  I  could 
feel  the  deep  throbs  of  his  reaction  in  his  present 
view  of  his  favorite  poem,  compared  with  his  for- 
mer conception  of  it  twenty  years  ago.  For  now  he 
gave  to  the  work  of  the  ever-striving  Faust  a  nega- 
tive outcome,  as  if  echoing  or  perchance  forecasting 
his  own  career.  That  shocked  me  more  than  any- 
thing else  he  did,  more  than  all  his  defiance  of  con- 
vention ;  it  thrilled  through  me  as  a  kind  of  Adam 's 
fall  of  the  man  whom  I  loved,  to  whom  I  owed  so 
much,  and  for  whom  I  felt  the  deepest  gratitude. 

It    seemed    a    curious    destiny    that    the    three 
pioneers  who  had  founded  and  kept  up  the  Philo- 


430    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

sophical  Society  in  St.  Louis  some  two  decades 
since,  had  now  come  together  in  a  strange  city  from 
different  parts  of  our  broad  country — Harris  from 
the  far  East,  Brockmeyer  from  the  far  West,  Snider 
from  the  Midland  somewhere  between.  Each  had 
undergone  since  then  his  own  peculiar  evolution, 
which,  it  may  be  here  foresaid,  is  by  no  means  com- 
pleted yet  in  any  single  one  of  the  three.  Each  is 
still  to  receive  a  considerable  discipline  before  he 
graduates  from  the  school  of  life,  whereof  this  book 
seeks  to  be  some  faint  record  telling  of  that  early 
St.  Louis  trio  of  friendship  and  philosophy. 

From  the  Milwaukee  experience  I  drew  several 
conclusions  for  the  future,  which  had  driven  them- 
selves deep  into  the  convolutions  of  my  brain. 

(1)  The  Literary  School  must  go  on  here  in  the 
West;  it  had  shown  its  validity,  at  least  as  one  of 
my  instruments.  Even  under  bad  handling,  it  had 
proved  that  it  could  not  only  live  but  thrive. 

(2)  The  management  must  be  changed.  I  re- 
solved that  hereafter  I  would  take  the  Literary 
School  into  my  own  hands,  especially  as  regards 
program,  lecturers,  and  conduct  of  the  exercises. 
Outside  help  I  would  have  to  seek  in  other  mat- 
ters, such  as  finance,  attendance,  halls  for  the  lec- 
tures, etc. 

(3)  Harris  I  must  secure  as  my  main  prop.  I 
found  on  inquiry  that  he  was  as  eager  to  support 
me  in  a  fresh  onset  as  I  was  to  get  his  help.  He 
wished  in  his  own  right  to  have  a  Western  audience 
in  Chicago,  which  was  hereafter  to  be  the  place 


THE  LITERARY  BIBLES.  431 

of  meeting.  Milwaukee,  in  spite  of  the  city's  loyal 
and  generous  co-operation,  had  to  be  given  up, 
though  the  same  management  talked  of  having  an- 
other session  the  following  year.  Then  after  secur- 
ing Harris  I  consulted  the  Sibyl  within  me  concern- 
ing Brockmeyer:  Dare  I  bring  the  genius  es- 
tranged, yet  once  the  creative  spirit  of  our  St. 
Louis  Movement,  to  Chicago,  itself  vortical?  The 
Oracle,  to  all  my  repeated  entreaties  persisted  per- 
versely dumb. 

(4)  The  theme  must  be  the  Literary  Bibles,  with 
concentration  upon  one  of  the  four  each  season,  till 
all  had  been  presented.  And  now  let  us  scan  some- 
what more  closely  this  theme,  not  new,  but  in  a 
wholly  new  situation  with  new  outlooks,  being  a 
sort  of  sacred  breviary  of  all  lettered  excellence, 
veritably  the  central  Organon  of  all  Literature. 

Ill 

The  Literary  Bibles 

I  do  not  know  how  many  times  I  have  used  in  the 
preceding  account  the  words  of  the  above  title  as  a 
kind  of  preluding  key-note  struck  in  advance  of 
the  present  Epoch,  of  which  they  express  the  dom- 
inant theme.  I  have  already  stated,  and  must 
often  repeat  that  this  term,  Literary  Bibles,  in  my 
nomenclature  applies  especially  to  the  four  greatest 
poetical  masterpieces  of  Europe,  which  we  may 
call  after  the  transmitted  names  of  their  authors, 


432    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

Homer,  Dante,  Shakespeare,  Goethe.  I  have  also 
confessed  that  I,  through  some  native  bent  or  spir- 
itual need  of  mine  own,  turned  away  from  other 
great  disciplines,  especially  from  Philosophy,  not 
to  speak  of  Theology,  to  find  in  these  supreme  books 
of  Literature  my  truest  and  most  compelling  form 
of  self-expression,  as  well  as  my  soul-world's  most 
immanent  evolution. 

It  is  with  some  flutterings  of  emotion  and  of  in- 
terrogation that  I  now  look  back  at  the  many  years 
of  my  middle  life,  the  most  active  part  of  this  ex- 
istence of  mine,  which  I  devoted  to  the  acquisition, 
reproduction,  and  propagation  of  these  Literary 
Bibles.  Was  the  work  worth  the  doing?  Why 
spend  on  this  far-off  adventure  so  much  of  my  best 
hope  ?  But  it  was  surely  of  no  small  human  value 
for  me  personally  to  become  acquainted  with  the 
choicest  spirits  of  our  race  at  their  highest  mo- 
ments. Not  merely  the  intellect's  knowledge  of  a 
book  I  sought,  but  I  would  live  the  life  of  its 
creator  as  he  revealed  himself  in  his  creation.  I 
would  find  the  man,  however  subtly  ensconced  in 
the  multifarious  play  of  his  words  and  deeds.  Hence 
it  came  that  I  endeavored  not  only  to  re-live  but  to 
compose  the  biography  of  each  of  these  supreme 
poets,  well  aware  that  his  autobiography  lay  lurk- 
ing in  every  true-ringing  sentence  which  passed 
through  his  creative  soul  into  song.  Even  the  sup- 
posed impersonal  Homer  I  sleuthed  into  and 
through  all  his  mythical  masks  and  concealments 
till  I  saw  him  face  to  face,  heard  his  own  private 


THE  LITERARY  BIBLES.  433 

story,  and  re-told  it  after  him  in  a  little  epic  of 
my  own  called  Homer  in  Chios. 

And  here  I  may  set  down  another  thought  which 
soon  came  to  me  in  this  quest :  the  unity  of  all  four, 
both  the  doers  and  their  deeds.  It  was  really  but 
one  great  book  written  in  four  parts  at  different 
periods  of  the  World's  History.  Hence  I  began  to 
feel,  though  at  first  in  a  dim  twilight,  that  I  must 
put  together,  organize,  and  associate  all  four  into 
a  new  fifth  book  or  work  by  their  deepest  spiritual 
principle  of  unification.  This  principle  quite  un- 
conscious in  the  poets  themselves,  who  sprang  up  in 
time  and  place  separately  in  separative  Europe, 
was  to  become  consciously  expressed  in  accord  with 
this  our  new  age  and  country,  and  particularly  with 
our  new  American  institutional  order.  Thus  our 
country,  realizing  its  deepest  spirit,  was  to  union- 
ize even  Europe's  very  diversely  timed,  placed,  and 
minded  Literary  Bibles.  Still  further,  these  four 
Great  Men  might  be  joined  together  in  the  con- 
ception of  one  vast  personality,  the  race-man  as 
universal  poet  uttering  himself  through  the  ages 
in  these  four  books  of  the  World's  One  Literary 
Bible.  Or,  to  vary  the  phrase  in  this  struggle  for 
expression,  the  World-Spirit  voices  through  these* 
four  poetic  representatives  one  original  basic  Mind 
with  its  speech,  though  this  be  divided  into  four 
separate  dialects. 

Thus  I  would  fain  think  that  a  spiritual  neces- 
sity of  the  time  and  locality,  as  well  of  myself,  kept 
urging  me  to  re-interpret,  and  therein  to  overmake 


434    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

all  these  scattered  greatest  greatnesses  of  the  ages 
into  a  new  unified  work  which  preserved  their  full 
distinctive  individuality,  yet  associated  them  as 
one  completely  rounded  literary  entirety.  In  this 
matter  I  may  give  a  brief  account  of  my  own  evo- 
lution. 

I.  Already  as  an  undergraduate  at  College  I  had 
vaguely  gotten  the  conception  of  these  four  great- 
est poems,  though  without  any  reason  for  their 
special  pre-eminence.  Still  even  then  and  there  I 
could  hardly  help  hearing  the  consensus  of  the  best 
concerning  what  is  best  in  Literature,  though  con- 
fusedly commingled  with  many  desultory,  and  also 
dissenting  voices.  I  learned  Homer  and  his  dialect 
by  routine  in  my  Freshman  year,  but  I  also  com- 
muned very  sympathetically  with  his  spirit,  which 
awakened  in  me  an  antique  life,  and  it  would  seem, 
a  germinal  world  for  my  future.  I  never  dared  let 
him  vanish  afterwards.  Into  Dante  I  likewise 
dipped,  as  well  as  into  Shakespeare  and  Goethe. 
Very  nebulous  then  to  me  were  these  huge  giants 
of  the  past,  somewhat  like  the  Old  Norse  Gods  of 
Niflheim ;  still  I  started  to  brood  over  their  super- 
manlike significance. 

The  second  stage  of  my  appreciation  of  the  Liter- 
ary Bibles  arose  with  emphasis  when  I  began  to 
associate  with  the  philosophic  set  in  St.  Louis.  Our 
leaders  were  warm  defenders  and  interrogators  of 
Great  Books,  especially  since  they  had  one  of  their 
own,  that  unique  Book  of  Hegel's  Philosophy,  as 
their  final  Oracle.     When  it  came  to  Literature, 


THE  LITERARY  BIBLES.  435 

Harris  found  his  most  congenial  utterance  in  Dante, 
upon  whom  he  was  destined  to  lecture  and  to  write 
a  good  deal,  while  Brockmeyer  scouted  Dante  to 
downright  abuse,  but  proclaimed  Goethe's  Faust 
as  the  greatest  of  all  the  world-poems.  Each  had 
likewise  his  secondary  preference  among  the  four 
which  were  frequently  cited  in  our  company  and 
discussed.  I  think  I  may  say  that  I  was  the  first 
of  our  people  who  definitely  put  all  four  together 
on  equal  terms,  and  called  them  the  "World's  Liter- 
ary Bibles.  Still  I  do  not  claim  universal  priority 
for  the  act  or  the  title ;  the  Literary  Tribunal  of  the 
Ages  had  already  made  the  selection,  though  the 
ultimate  ground  for  such  selection  remained  to  be 
adequately  unfolded. 

During  my  Classical  Journey,  I  experienced  the 
third  phase  of  my  training  in  the  Literary  Bibles. 
I  would  not  only  read  each  of  them  in  the  original 
tongue,  but  I  longed  to  speak  and  to  hear  that 
tongue  as  it  still  flowed  spontaneously  from  the 
hearts  of  the  people.  So  I  never  stopped  till  I 
talked  Italian  in  Dante's  Florence,  and  till  I  spoke 
Greek  in  Homer's  Hellas.  Great  was  the  satisfac- 
tion of  listening  to  the  very  accent  of  a  Literary 
Bible,  and  of  replying  to  it  in  the  native  words  of 
the  master.  Shakespeare 's  English  was  my  mother 
tongue,  and  Goethe's  German  had  become  mine  at 
St.  Louis  by  adoption.  Thus  I  sought  to  recover 
partially  at  least  the  original  heart-beat  of  the  sing- 
ing poet,  as  he  voiced  his  pristine  measures  of  song. 
"Without  such  preparation  I  could  hardly  have  en- 


436    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

tered  into  that  first  communion  with  these  remote 
spirits,  which  was  requisite  for  my  creative  as- 
similation of  their  works. 

The  fourth  stage  I  may  call  that  which  I  have 
already  recounted  as  having  begun  with  my  expo- 
sitions of  the  Literary  Bibles  at  St.  Louis  and  at 
Concord,  after  my  return  from  abroad.  That  is, 
I  was  now  to  put  in  order  and  to  impart  what  I 
had  won  through  long  studious  endeavor  and 
through  a  continuous  evolution  of  myself  in  this 
special  sphere.  The  impression  would  not  quit  me 
that  I  must  now  reconstruct  these  books,  yea  re- 
write them  in  a  certain  sense,  if  I  was  to  receive 
from  them  their  best  value,  which  meant  also  a  re- 
construction of  myself  at  the  same  time.  So  these 
Classes  became  a  new  education  for  me,  or  at  least 
a  new  epochal  training  in  my  whole  life's  educa- 
tion. I  was  learning  as  much  as  my  pupils ;  indeed 
I  rather  thought  that  I  was  my  own  best  pupil. 

II.  Naturally  I  sought  help  in  the  works  of  other 
expositors,  which  were  strown  in  abundance  all  the 
way  down  the  ages.  Material  assistance  in  the  line 
of  historical,  philological  and  metrical  explanations 
was  of  basic  importance ;  but  the  so-called  literary 
criticism  gave  me  little  satisfaction,  since  it  hardly 
touched  upon  what  I  most  wanted.  Beautiful  meta- 
phors, striking  passages,  telling  descriptions  of 
character  and  sundry  other  externals  must  indeed 
be  duly  noted  and  enjoyed;  but  the  Literary  Bible 
was  to  be  seen  and  interpreted  as  a  great  spiritual 
document  in  the  progress  of  humanity,  and  likewise 


THE  LITERARY  BIBLES.  437 

of  the  individual.  It  was  not  simply  exquisite 
verse-making,  though  it  should  be  that  too  and  at 
the  topmost ;  but  the  Literary  Bible  also  had  ulti- 
mately to  approve  itself  priestly,  mediatorial,  cap- 
able of  revealing  man's  universal  religion  to  the 
open-hearted  reader. 

Hence  the  question  with  me  rose  in  regard  to 
these  greatest  poets,  how  can  I  pierce  to  the  center 
of  their  mystery  of  enduring  greatness,  commune 
with  that  and  appropriate  it,  yea  reproduce  it  in 
my  own  soul  somehow,  and  re-utter  it  in  my  own 
form  ?  That  might  be,  for  me,  a  new  document  in 
quest  of  immortality.  I  would  penetrate  to  the 
very  workshop  of  their  genius,  see  it  at  its  creative 
task  and  then  re-word  in  my  own  dialect  what  I 
saw.  Such  was  my  function  if  I  was  ever  to  com- 
pose a  distinctive  commentary  upon  these  grand 
poetic  structures,  which  was  to  show  them  re-built 
and  overwrought  into  my  own  time,  and  its  way 
of  thinking.  They  were  not  to  be  left  merely  with 
some  running  glosses  on  the  text,  linguistic  and 
critical,  but  the  text  itself  was  to  be  rewritten  and 
attuned  to  a  new  style,  perchance  not  altogether 
poetic  in  the  old  sense.  The  Literary  Bibles  give 
you  their  best  when  they  impart  to  you  their  very 
creative  power  to  re-create  in  and  through  your  own 
soul-form  their  act  of  genesis.  Everything  else  in 
the  way  of  translation,  comment,  or  exegesis  is  ex- 
ternal and  insufficient  compared  to  this  ultimate 
genetic  energy  of  creation's  own  writ.  The  very 
thought  of  such  an  attempt  seems  perhaps  the 


438    TEE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT—PART  SECOND. 

height  of  egotistical  audacity,  but  the  St.  Louis 
Movement  with  its  anti-traditional  spirit  could  not 
stop  to  dally  with  modesty. 

III.  It  may  be  here  recorded  that  I  never  felt 
the  least  desire  to  translate  into  our  vernacular  any 
of  these  foreign-tongued  grandeurs  of  human  ut- 
terance. All  of  them  indeed  I  would  learn  to  un- 
derstand and  to  assimilate  in  their  immediate  na- 
tive rapture  of  expression,  as  jetted  up  by  their 
own  tongue's  first  gush,  but  to  make  them  talk 
English  word  for  word  was  not  my  call.  Of  course 
I  employed  translations  in  my  various  activities, 
but  I  wished  to  reconstruct,  not  simply  to  repeat 
the  poet  with  a  verbal  difference.  To  be  sure,  I 
would  seek  to  know  his  work  in  itself  as  a  whole ; 
but  this  was  not  the  finality  of  it,  for  it  too  must 
be  seen  at  last  as  a  part  of  the  greater  whole,  which 
compels  it  to  be  surveyed  and  constituted  afresh  in 
the  light  of  a  new  literary  conception. 

I  dared  think  that  this  was  our  American,  or  if 
you  will,  our  democratic  way  of  approach  to  these 
Literary  Bibles,  which  are  all  of  Europe,  being 
sprung  of  the  European  mind,  and  manifesting  its 
supreme  spiritual  nodes  for  more  than  twenty-five 
centuries.  These  far-separated  four  world-books 
we  must  unify  in  response  to  our  own  deepest  in- 
stitutional consciousness;  that  is,  we  must  federal- 
ize them  out  of  their  European  disunion.  This  will 
require,  to  keep  up  the  analogy,  a  new  constitution 
of  the  separate  poems,  a  new  unitary  ordering  of 
them  under  their  higher  law,  which  will  not  swal- 


THE  LITERARY  BIBLES.  439 

low  up  their  individuality,  but  will  preserve  it  all 
the  better  through  our  larger  poetic  association. 
From  this  angle  of  vision  such  a  work  may  be 
called  the  American  Federal  Union  of  the  Literary 
Bibles. 

In  another  aspect  we  may  regard  a  production 
of  the  sort  as  having  in  practice  a  democratic  pur- 
pose or  tendency.  "We  cannot  absorb  the  vast  com- 
plex Literatures  transmitted  to  us  from  the  Past, 
yet  we,  as  their  heirs,  must  somehow  get  to  know 
their  scope,  their  essence,  and  to  appropriate  their 
highest  worth.  It  is  impossible  for  us  in  our  busy 
age  to  read  so  many  books ;  they  must  be  epitomized 
to  their  most  concentrated  values.  The  tribunal 
of  the  centuries  has  .made  and  seals  with  its  ap- 
proval the  selection  of  the  Literary  Bibles,  which 
thus  become  text-books  in  the  High  School  of  Civili- 
zation. 

We  might  speculate  over  this  selection  and  its 
mystery ;  I  did  not  make  it,  nor  any  nameable  per- 
son of  any  time,  nor  did  any  age  make  it,  however 
golden.  Still  we  all  have  heard  the  decision  with 
more  or  less  distinctness ;  I  have  already  told  how  I 
learned  about  it  as  a  boy  at  College,  though  very 
faintly.  The  first  news  concerning  it  came  to  me 
hardly  more  definite  than  this:  a  little  row  of 
books  stand  there  on  the  shelf  before  me,  which 
books  the  best  judges  of  the  best  ages  decide  to  be 
the  best  in  all  the  world.  Out  of  the  vast  written 
chaos  of  the  past  a  sifting  has  been  secretly  made 
by  the  most  capable  just  for  our  behoof.    Such  is 


440    THE  ST- LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

our  first  great  help,  quite  providential;  for  we  of 
ourselves  feel  utterly  impotent  to  make  any  Her- 
culean choice  of  the  kind.  But  the  next  help  is  that 
we  help  ourselves  to  this  noblest  gift  of  time,  and 
make  it  our  own ;  for  at  this  point  Providence  turns 
the  job  over  to  us,  insisting  upon  our  free  yet  thor- 
ough co-operation. 

IV.  A  good  deal  of  objection  from  time  to  time 
was  raised  against  my  use  of  the  word  Bible  in  this 
connection,  even  when  limited  by  the  adjective 
Literary.  Not  a  few  religious  people,  and  espe- 
cially zealous  ministers  would  protest  that  there 
was  but  the  one  all-sufficient  Bible,  the  one  com- 
prising the  Old  and  New  Testaments.  I  carefully 
distinguished  the  Religious  Bibles  of  the  Orient 
from  the  Secular  Bibles  of  Europe,  setting  forth 
their  differences  but  insisting  also  upon  their  deeper 
common  spirit  and  function.  My  call,  however, 
was  to  devote  myself  to  the  latter,  especially  as  the 
former  had  a  numerous  and  consecrated  priest- 
hood, while  I  in  my  peculiar  labor,  as  far  as  I  knew, 
stood  quite  alone.  I  never  overcame  this  sectarian 
prejudice,  as  I  may  call  it,  although  I  gratefully 
acknowledge  that  my  warmest  and  most  numerous 
supporters  belonged  to  the  liberal  orthodox  type. 
I  never  made  much  headway  among  the  strait-laced 
believers  in  the  letter  of  Scripture,  and  still  less 
among  the  so-called  Free  Religionists — the  two  ex- 
tremes of  faith  and  unfaith  in  our  time,  the  one 
of  too  much  tradition,  and  the  other  of  too  much 
negation.     Neither  of  these  opposites  could  ever 


THE  LITERARY  BIBLES.  441 

realize  any  great  good  out  of  my  evangel  according 
to  the  Literary  Bibles. 

Now  these  Supreme  Books  became  to  me,  when 
sounded  to  their  depths,  a  new  revelation  of  im- 
mortality, this  deepest  and  most  abiding  aspiration 
of  the  human  soul,  yet  the  hardest  to  make  actual 
not  only  in  life  but  also  in  expression.  What  is 
eternal  in  the  written  word  I  sought  to  find,  if  pos- 
sible, as  the  ultimate  realization  of  what  lay  most 
profound  and  compelling  and  eternal  within  me. 
Then  I  must  re-create  it,  re-write  it,  and  impart  it 
by  speech  and  print,  up  to  the  outreach  of  my  very 
finite  power.  To  popularize  means  usually  to  super- 
ficialize ;  but  these  Greatest  Books  I  dared  not  shal- 
low out  into  merely  ephemeral  magazinism ;  rather 
would  I  try  to  deepen  their  popularity  to  their  last 
profundity,  wherein  lies  their  crowning,  truly  re- 
demptive excellence. 

V.  Still  it  must  be  confessed  that  also  these  Liter- 
ary Bibles  were  finally  traditional,  handed  down  to 
us  from  the  outside,  being  utterances,  in  form  at 
least,  of  the  European  mind,  not  directly  of  ours. 
This,  I  now  feel,  was  what  kept  driving  me  secretly 
for  many  years  to  make  them  over  into  a  new  ex- 
pression, to  transform  all  four  into  another  book 
which  I  have  daringly  called  the  fifth  in  a  previous 
sentence,  though  it  can  make  no  claim  to  be  actually 
a  Literary  Bible.  Rather  is  it  a  new  interpretation 
of  the  old  oracles,  than  an  oracle  itself.  Still  the 
mark  of  Europe's  prescription  is  upon  them  and 
cannot  be,  indeed  ought  not  to  be,  obliterated. 


442    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

In  this  respect  these  products  of  mine  bear  the 
stamp  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  which  winds 
through  them  all,  and  which,  in  its  origin,  as  al- 
ready set  forth,  puts  an  anti-traditional  impress 
upon  very  tradition,  especially  in  philosophy  and 
in  literature.  Nevertheless  there  is  felt  in  them  the 
hidden  push  for  something  beyond,  for  a  harmony 
still  unattained.  The  conscious  intended  scope  of 
them  remains  externally  philosophical,  showing 
many  traces  of  Hegel,  but  shot  through  everywhere 
with  upbursts  from  a  deeper  depth,  which  I  now 
recognize  to  be  psychological.  A  new  discipline, 
unborn  as  yet  but  mentally  begotten  and  stealthily 
waxing  in  strength,  would  send  many  a  throbbing 
sign  of  itself  to  the  surface  in  my  most  significant 
writing.  And  my  pupils,  especially  the  later  ones, 
have  often  made  the  same  observation.  Only  the 
other  day  a  penetrating  student  said  to  me :  "Your 
Shakespeare  has  underneath  it  everywhere  your 
Psychology."  My  answer  followed:  "When  I 
wrote  that  work,  I  was  not  conscious  of  any  such 
underlying  substrate  pushing  up  for  expression ;  I 
had  not  yet  evolved  into  Psychology. ' '  Then  came 
the  reply :  ' '  Yes,  I  know  that ;  still  it  is  there  all 
the  same,  and  to  watch  its  first  bubbles  is  one  of 
my  chief  interests  in  the  perusal  of  your  earlier 
books." 

So  I  may  be  permitted  to  say  here  in  advance, 
for  the  sake  of  the  presaged  interlinking  future, 
that  within  all  my  volumes  (nine  of  them)  on  Uni- 
versal Literature,  is  fermenting,  evolving,  erupting 


THE  LITERARY  BIBLES.  443 

spasmodically  toward  light  the  deeper  Universal 
Psychology  which  got  definitely  born  into  conscious 
thought  and  expression  during  the  last  half  of  the 
nineties,  and  which  lies  ahead  of  us  still  some  ten 
gravid  years  and  more.  So  let  my  circumspect 
reader  fail  not  to  take  this  peep  forward  from  his 
own  Lookout  Mountain. 

IV. 

The  Wanderer 

Thus  I  designate  myself  distinctively  in  my  out- 
ward activity  during  this  Epoch  :  I  was  seized  with 
that  ever-pushing  passion  called  in  old  Saxon-Eng- 
lish Wanderlust  (word  still  found  in  to-day's  Teu- 
tonic) ,  the  irresistible  desire  to  travel,  to  get  out  of 
one  spot  into  another  and  then  away  again,  to  turn 
up  continually  fresh  experiences  in  time,  place  and 
personality.  Such  an  appetite  is  usually  an  asset 
of  the  young  fellow,  before  he  settles  down  in  life ; 
he  has  his  years  of  wandering  outer  and  inner,  in 
which  he  thirsts  after  the  globe's  variety,  without 
much  feeling  for  its  unity.  But  I  was  crossing  the 
bar  into  middle-age  when  this  peculiar  unrest 
seized  me  and  whipped  me  around  the  country,  to 
my  own  great  satisfaction.  Moreover  I  was  free 
to  float  about,  having  cast  off  my  local  trammels 
and  refusing  to  bond  myself  to  any  new  obligation, 
which  might  interfere  with  my  blissful  errantry. 
Prom  this  point  of  view  it  was  my  time  of  down- 
right vagabondage,  of  literary  hoboism,  though  I 


444   THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

always  paid  my  scot  on  the  railroad  and  at  the 
tavern,  as  well  as  my  printer 's  bills  for  books. 

Still,  on  the  other  hand  I  may  be  permitted  to 
give  myself  a  better  name  during  this  Epoch,  call- 
ing it  the  period  of  my  long  devoted  apostolate,  in 
which  I  dedicated  myself  to  the  dissemination  of 
the  gospel  according  to  the  Literary  Bibles.  This 
was  the  eternal  element  in  all  my  otherwise  fleeting 
and  floating  apparitions,  hither  and  thither;  I  had 
my  evangel  to  impart  and  to  set  down  in  writ, 
whereby  I  was  always  held  anchored.  Moreover  I 
clung  to  my  local  center  in  the  main,  though  with 
many  considerable  explorations,  always  sailing  out 
from  and  porting  back  to  Chicago. 

But  my  territory  had  its  limits.  Mason  and 
Dixon's  old  line  was  drawn  against  me  with  deci- 
sion, though  St.  Louis  originated  the  Movement, 
and  though  several  times  I  gave  courses  at  Wash- 
ington and  once  at  Baltimore.  But  these  are 
not  distinctively  Southern  cities.  From  Missouri, 
outside  the  St.  Louis  district,  I  do  not  recollect  of 
ever  having  heard  even  a  pious  wish  for  any  of  my 
peculiar  biblical  lore.  To  be  sure,  the  city  and  the 
state  are  on  bad  terms;  they  both  have  to  live  in 
one  limited  household,  like  husband  and  wife, 
though  perpetually  fussing ;  they  keep  abusing  each 
other  with  good  reason,  yet  are  undivorcible,  each 
blaming  the  other  especially  for  its  fatal  slowness 
in  the  world's  grand  march  westward,  and  for  the 
lost  opportunity  of  greatness,  even  for  the  Great 
Illusion — the  most  unhappy  civic  pair  in  the  land 


THE  WANDERER.  445 

unless  it  be  that  overfat,  ever-brabbling  couple 
world-defamed  as  New  York  city  and  New  York 
state.  But  quite  everywhere,  town  and  country  are 
the  two  huge  millstones  which  are  bound  to  crunch 
and  grind  together  on  each  other,  the  painful  grist 
being  civilization  itself. 

The  Pacific  coast  I  never  reached  though  I  had 
a  single  chance,  rather  uncertain.     The  Atlantic 
seaboard  I  tried  at  several  well-peopled  spots,  but 
I  was  soon  made  aware  of  what  I  specially  lacked, 
namely  coloniality.    Two  or  three  winters  I  passed 
in  New  York  city,  then  and  now  the  center  of  ex- 
ploited literature  with  its  three  great  temptations, 
money,  fame,  influence.    I  saw  some  literary  people 
in  their  workshops,  best  known  of  whom  were  the 
poets  Stedman  and  Stoddard.  Very  kind  and  agree- 
able personally  to  me  were  both,  but  their  vocation 
of  letters  with  its  subservience  to  magazinism  and 
newspaperism  drove  me  to  a  silent  oath  of  Never- 
more.   New  York  at  that  time  was  the  hotbed  of 
American  book-publishers  and  is  yet ;  still  I  dared 
print   a  work   of   mine,   Agamemnon's   Daughter 
(first    edition),    whose    manuscript  I  had  brought 
with  me,  having  hired  my  own  little  printer  not 
two  blocks  from  Franklin  Square.    He  did  his  job 
very  badly,  and  I  think  dishonestly,  all  of  which 
may  be  deemed  the  penalty  for  such  a  deed  of  local 
desecration  on  the  part  of  the  sacrilegious  West- 
erner.    I  never  submitted  my  manuscript  to  any 
publisher ;  I  did  not  believe,  in  the  first  place,  that 
it  would  be  accepted ;  but,  in  the  second  place,  I 


446    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

knew  that  I  could  get  rid  of  a  small  edition  by  my 
own  effort,  while  I  was  quite  uncertain  whether  a 
publisher,  after  being  paid  for  his  service,  could 
do  as  much  if  he  would,  or  would  do  as  much  if  he 
could.  This  last  alternative  hints  a  dark  suspicion 
which  I  have  heard  repeatedly  from  authors,  in  one 
instance  from  a  distinguished  and  successful  au- 
thor ;  but  of  course  I  have  had  no  experience  of  the 
kind  myself,  as  I  never  took  the  chance  of  having  it. 
But  what  I  do  know  from  some  little  experience  of 
another  kind  is  that  authors  as  a  class  are  prone  to 
be  suspicious  of  publishers  and  public,  and  also 
they  fail  not  to  be  jealous  of  one  another. 

Through  the  kind  influence  of  Stedman  I  re- 
ceived a  card  of  free  entrance  to  the  famous  Cen- 
tury Club,  where  I  caught  a  glimpse  of  many  dis- 
tinguished New  Yorkers  belonging  chiefly  to  the 
learned  professions.  My  introduction  was  mainly 
to  the  literary  men  of  the  Club,  whose  works  I  had 
never  read,  often  never  heard  of ;  this  ignorance  of 
mine  caused  me  embarrassment  from  the  start,  for 
I  did  not  know  enough  about  them  even  to  tell  a 
lie,  and  I  soon  observed  that  they  expected  some 
kind  of  recognition,  if  not  flattery.  As  for  me,  I 
found  the  easiest  way  to  get  along  was  to  conceal 
my  own  authorship,  which  of  course  was  a  very 
easy  matter ;  in  fact,  it  was  already  concealed,  with- 
out further  effort  of  mine.  So  I  tried  to  watch  and 
to  learn  from  my  hidden  nook;  out  of  my  experi- 
ence I  drew  the  conclusion  again  that  I  was  an  un- 
fit subject  for  such  a  life,  in  other  words  that  mine 


THE  WANDERER.  447 

was  a  wholly  tmclubbable  individuality,  even  if  it 
needing  clubbing  badly.  Some  time  later  through 
the  friendly  urgency  of  Librarian  Poole,  I  became 
a  member  of  the  Chicago  Literary  Club,  but  after 
a  year's  trial  I  passed  the  same  judgment  once 
more  and  for  a  finality  upon  myself,  and  withdrew 
from  it  on  quitting  Chicago  for  another  city.  When 
reading  Walt  Whitman,  I  always  felt  that  I  had 
not  the  gift  of  comradery  which  he  so  effusively 
celebrates,  and  hence  I  never  could  be  the  loving 
disciple  of  his  much-lauded  message. 

So  it  came  about  that  the  main  field  of  my  new 
gospelling  itinerancy  lay  in  the  states  of  the  old 
North-Western  Territory  long  ago  dedicated  to 
freedom  by  Thomas  Jefferson  in  the  ordinance  of 
1787  (though  this  historic  point  we  now  hear  con- 
tested) .  Of  course  all  these  broad  acres  I  was  very 
far  from  covering.  In  my  native  state,  Ohio,  I  ap- 
peared, according  to  present  recollection,  but  thrice, 
in  the  cities  of  Cleveland,  Columbus,  Cincinnati  re- 
spectively. But  I  never  reached  Oberlin,  my  Alma 
Mater,  with  my  evangel  of  the  Literary  Bibles,  for 
a  good  reason,  I  think,  since  these  belonged  not  to 
her  accepted  biblical  canon.  But  the  wanderer  has 
now  wandered  enough  even  for  this  wandering 
Epoch  of  his;  so  let  him  just  say  once  more  that 
Indiana  and  Illinois  persisted  in  offering  to  him 
year  after  year  his  main  seed-fields,  which  he,  like 
his  exemplar,  Johnny  Appleseed,  often  re-visited 
for  the  purpose  of  reaping  a  small  harvest  as  well 
as  putting  in  a  new  crop,  never  very  large. 


448    THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

From  this  outer  spatial  wandering  with  its  many 
diverse  occurrences  during  the  present  Epoch,  let 
us  next  turn  to  the  center,  to  the  wanderer  in  per- 
son, who  is  again  trying  to  express  himself  in  liter- 
ary form.  That  is,  I,  during  this  whole  errantry, 
kept  taking  pictures  of  myself  as  I  moved  about 
from  place  to  place,  carrying-on  my  varied  labors. 
For  I  had  to  express  myself  not  only  in  the  thing 
done,  but  also  in  the  doing  of  it,  as  the  doer;  in 
other  words,  while  I  wrought  at  and  propagated 
the  Literary  Bibles,  I  uttered  myself  as  worker  and 
propagator  in  the  self's  own  form  of  activity,  em- 
ploying my  special  vehicle  of  utterance.  Accord- 
ingly in  this  field,  more  or  less  self-revealing,  I 
wrote  a  little  literature  of  my  own,  embracing  three 
books  which  I  shall  now  join  together  into  a  com- 
mon idea,  with  its  label  indicating  my  wanderlust 
as  it  expresses  itself  in  the  Mythus  of  Johnny  Ap- 
pleseed. 

These  three  books,  which  I  thus  place  under  one 
general  head  bear  the  titles  (1)  Johnny  Apple- 
seed's  Rhymes,  (2)  The  Freehurgers,  a  novel,  (3) 
World's  Fair  Studies.  The  underlying  character 
of  the  present  Epoch  belongs  to  them  all,  though 
in  different  ways.  Each  has  its  own  special  sub- 
ject, as  well  as  method  of  procedure,  yet  they  all 
in  one  way  or  other  pivot  on  the  wanderer,  the  mis- 
sionary, who  is  also  the  self-expresser. 

The  name  of  the  first  book,  Johnny  Appleseed's 
Rhymes,  indicates  on  the  surface  perhaps  some  con- 
venient reservoir  into  which  a  mass  of  versicles 


THE  WANDERER.  449 

have  been  indiscriminately  plumped,  with  little  if 
any  connection.  But  at  the  start  I  would  em- 
phasize its  inner  order  and  evolution,  though  these 
may  have  to  be  sharply  looked  after.  For  it  takes, 
I  would  believe,  its  art-form  ultimately  from  the 
Epoch  which  it  mythically  celebrates — rambling  ex- 
ternally, anchored  internally.  My  name  does  not 
appear  on  thle  title-page;  the  subject-matter  is 
conceived  as  a  considerable  miscellany  of  prose 
and  verse,  "edited  by  Theophilus  Middling,"  who 
also  seems  to  cite  certain  commentators.  But  the 
chief  portion  centers  in  the  fabled  rhymes  of 
Johnny  Appleseed,  as  he  strolled  over  the  North- 
West,  scattering  his  fruit-bearers  of  the  future. 

As  to  its  origin,  I  can  truly  say  that  the  book 
grew  and  kept  growing  for  at  least  ten  years,  with- 
out any  conscious  purpose  of  ever  becoming  a 
book.  The  first  fact  which  I  now  can  recollect  is 
that  little  jets  of  rhymed  versicles  started  to  gush 
up  about  the  time  I  was  quitting  St.  Louis  (1874- 
5) ;  then  the  fountain  would  stop  playing  for  a 
season,  and  I  would  think  that  it  had  dried  out 
forever,  when  of  a  sudden  it  would  begin  again, 
spirting  its  little  rhyme-drops  as  merrily  as  before. 
It  seemed  to  be  the  successor  of  my  Epigram- 
matic Voyage,  during  which  the  world  of  the  old 
Greek  Anthology  took  life  and  shape  in  my  mind 
and  heart,  insisting  upon  a  fresh  expression,  at 
least  for  myself.  But  in  her  present  love  of 
Johnny  Appleseed,  the  Muse  persistently  refused 
to  breathe  a  single  hexameter,  which  measure  kept 


450    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

caroling  her  sole  music  during  the  Greek  Journey. 
She  seemed  to  have  fled  from  Parnassus,  and  to 
have  migrated  with  me  to  the  Mississippi  Valley, 
which  the  new  theme  and  the  new  world  attuned 
with  the  new  rhythmical  cadence. 

At  last  this  intermittent  fountain  of  versicles 
and  ballads  stayed  intermitted,  having  apparently 
exhausted  itself  toward  the-  close  of  the  Epoch. 
Accordingly,  in  1894  I  printed  the  book  as  it  now 
stands,  and  thus  got  free  of  its  spell  which  has 
never  plagued  me  since.  I  may  add  here  that  after 
a  hundred  or  so  of  these  wee  musical  atomies  had 
throbbed  to  the  light  in  mutually  recalcitrant  sep- 
aration, they  began  to  get  social,  and  to  arrange 
themselves  in  groups  after  some  common  principle 
or  rubric.  For,  as  so  many  little  isolated  individ- 
ualities, they  appeared  rather  hapless  and  hope- 
less. Then,  during  the  last  year  or  two  before  they 
were  born  into  the  aforesaid  print,  an  enevloping 
world  of  prose  started  to  wreathe  itself  around 
them,  and  took  them  into  its  bosom.  That  new 
setting  really  brought  to  light  their  hitherto  con- 
cealed background,  out  of  which  they  had  sprung. 
Hence  it  became  a  kind  of  running  commentary, 
which  in  its  turn  strangely  ran  into  the  form  of  a 
story  ending  in  a  little  love-romance.  Thus  the 
whole  work  grew  to  be  a  labyrinthine  commingling 
of  a  number  of  literary  forms,  making  a  composite 
defiant  of  all  artistic  tradition.  Is  it  a  horrible 
monstrosity  or  a  newly  ordered  organism  of  writ? 
I  printed  it  myself,  and  did  not  even  send  review 


THE  WANDERER.  451 

copies  to  the  newspapers  or  magazines,  so  that  any 
judgment  of  the  professional  critic  I  have  never 
met  with,  though  I  think  I  could  predict  it  with  a 
little  effort. 

So  much  for  the  external  semblance  of  the  book. 
The  content  is  the  whole  St.  Louis  Movement  my- 
thologized,  with  its  leading  personages  and  its  es- 
sential development  and  also  its  philosophy  of  life 
cast  into  the  frame-work  of  a  story.  The  ideas  of 
our  St.  Louis  time  are  strewn  through  the  text, 
both  the  rhymed  and  the  unrhymed;  but  they  are 
made  to  portray  the  different  characters  who  voice 
them  in  a  responsive  interplay.  Thus  a  little  epic, 
or  drama,  or  even  novel  the  work  may  be  regarded, 
though  these  traditional  terms  hardly  fit  the  re- 
fractory stuff. 

Of  course  it  is  specially  an  eject  of  my  own  ex- 
perience present  and  past.  In  fact  through  it  ev- 
erywhere courses  a  disguised  autobiography  of 
the  writer  during  this  Epoch,  for  he  has  to  be  all 
of  these  colliding  characters  and  himself  too. 
Somewhere  about  four  hundred  verses  are  here 
caught  and  worded,  as  they  bubbled  up  out  of  the 
life-stream  from  its  various  inner  agitations;  then 
all  are  built  into  a  structure  which  seeks  to  reveal 
the  order  in  this  wayward  spontaneity,  uniting  its 
scattered  fragments  of  chaos  into  its  cosmos. 
What  he  says  of  Homer,  Appleseed  might  dare 
think  of  himself: 

Old  Homer  shows  a  young  face  to  the  boy 

And  gives  him  in  love  a  beautiful  toy; 


452    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

But   to  the   full-grown  man 

He  reveals  God's  plan. 

The  next  book  on  the  list,  The  Freeburgers, 
has  quite  a  different  beginning  and  ending,  as 
well  as  a  change  of  manner  and  matter.  Still 
it  keeps  the  central  story  of  Johnny  Appleseed,  the 
wandering  minstrel  and  planter,  as  its  determin- 
ing factor,  but  he  now  appears,  speaking,  acting, 
perambulating  in  his  own  person,  which  he  did  not 
in  the  previous  book.  There  he  was  the  silent  center, 
of  whom  much  is  said  and  sung ;  but  here  he  is  en- 
dowed with  his  own  voice,  talking  and  versifying  in 
his  own  right.  He  is  no  longer  past  but  present, 
with  his  career  largely  behind  him  indeed,  yet  with 
somewhat  of  life  still  before  him. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  scene,  the  action  proper 
is  not  cotemporary,  but  goes  back  to  the  time  of 
the  Civil  War,  of  which  it  proposes  to  picture  the 
beginning,  middle,  and  end.  Thus  I  reached  rear- 
ward in  reminiscence  thirty  years  and  more  to  my 
youth,  and  set  forth  my  experiences  personal,  do- 
mestic, communal,  and  national,  during  that  su- 
preme crisis  of  our  country's  history.  I  had  lived 
through  it  all  and  taken  part  in  it  with  thought, 
feeling,  and  action;  so  I  would  now  recall  and  ex- 
press it  after  a  generation,  before  the  epochal  oc- 
currence might  wane  from  memory.  The  time  of  it 
lay  before  my  St.  Louis  period,  through  which  I 
had  passed  on  my  way  toward  a  completer  expres- 
sion of  my  life  and  of  my  environing  world. 

Thus  I  conceived  what  may  be  called  a  national 


TEE  WANDERER.  453 

Novel,  for  everywhere  through  it  and  around  it  was 
to  weave  the  political  trend  of  the  country,  which 
turned  at  last  upon  the  question  of  Union  or  Dis- 
union. The  medium  through  which  the  great  con- 
flict was  portrayed  and  reflected,  was  the  small  com- 
munity called  Freeburg,  a  typical  village  of  the 
North-West,  very  familiar  to  me  during  boyhood. 
For  the  American  village  was  then  and  still  is,  in 
my  opinion,  more  nearly  our  institutional  unit, 
than  any  other  communal  form.  It  is  the  little  liv- 
ing cell  which  ultimately  constitutes  the  unitary 
principle  of  the  huge  social  organism  and  its  dif- 
ferent members.  So  this  village  unit  is  rightly  the 
miniature  mirror  which  images  and  indeed  vivifies 
the  time's  great  and  varied  institutions. 

The  novel  was  thus  planned  to  round  itself  out  in 
three  large  sweeps  or  parts,  to  each  of  which  was 
assigned  a  volume. 

I.  The  Freeburgers,  or  Before  the  War. 

II.  Freeburg,  or  During  the  War. 

III.  New  Freeburg,  or  After  the  War,  wherein 
was  embraced  the  Nation's  reconstruction  with  its 
many  ups  and  downs.  Abraham  Lincoln  was  to  ap- 
pear, specially  in  the  middle  volume.  The  village 
had  its  own  characters  and  life,  but  into  its  destiny 
were  woven  two  wanderers  from  the  outside,  the 
old  singer  Appleseed  and  the  philosophic  pedes- 
trian, both  properly  missionaries  of  the  St.  Louis 
Movement,  in  its  two  leading  phases. 

Thus  I,  too,  with  many  another  ambitious  author, 
meditated  the  great  American  Novel  on  our  loftiest 


454    THE  ST.  LOUTS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

national  theme.  But  somehow  it  refused  to  get  it- 
self done.  Only  the  first  part,  The  Freeburgers, 
could  be  pushed,  with  some  self-lashing,  to  comple- 
tion, though  I  made  copious  notes  on  the  other  two 
parts,  which  still  lie  about  in  fragments,  unrealized 
and  unrealizable.  Finally  in  1889  I  printed  this  first 
part,  and  so  disentangled  myself  forever  from  a 
task  which  I  saw  to  be  unfinishable. 

iWhy  did  I  break  down?  I  was  in  the  habit  of 
reading  some  novels,  but  not  many;  a  hearty,  per- 
sistent novel-reader  like  my  friend  Judge  Woerner 
I  never  was,  and  could  not  be.  He  said  of  this  book 
of  mine :  ' '  Too  much  of  your  philosophy  in  it,  too 
little  incident ;  you  have  cheated  me  of  my  pleasure 
and  set  me  at  hard  work  against  my  will — anathe- 
ma.*' He  found,  however,  the  same  fault  with 
Goethe's  Wilhelm  Meister,  whereupon  I  replied, 
with  a  sighful  exclamation :  ' '  O  that  my  book  may 
be  able  to  raise  itself  into  the  high  company  where 
you  have  put  it!"  Time  has  shown,  I  think,  that 
the  Novel  was  not  the  right  literary  form  for  my 
conception,  since  afterwards  my  experience  of  the 
Civil  "War  and  of  Lincoln  wrought  for  itself  a  very 
different  garb  which  got  itself  finally  done  to  the  last 
stitch.  Moreover  I  was  not  yet  ready  for  the  task; 
I  was  not  old  enough  even  at  forty-seven ;  I  had  to 
have  the  discipline  of  another  and  new  Epoch  when 
the  same  conception,  after  more  than  two  decades 
of  additional  brooding  and  incubation,  will  hatch 
itself  out  to  light  and  maturity. 

Still  the  Novel  remained  one  of    my    forms  of 


THE  WANDERER.  455 

self-expression,  and  in  its  own  good  time  on  due 
provocation  it  will  break  out  afresh  and  find  utter- 
ance. But  it  could  never  dominate  me  autocrati- 
cally, though  its  personal  rewards  dance  seductively 
the  greatest  temptation  of  modern  literature  before 
the  easily  bedazzled  fancy  of  the  writing-guild. 

The  third  book  above  listed  under  the  name  of 
World's  Fair  Studies,  appears  on  the  outside  a  sol- 
itary bird  of  passage  among  my  writings.  Nothing 
of  mine  hitherto  or  hereafter  ever  became  quite  like 
it  in  matter  or  in  treatment ;  still  it  belonged  to  the 
present  Epoch.  For  I  remained  in  it  the  wanderer, 
though  my  field  swept  no  longer  over  the  broad 
North-West,  but  shrank  to  the  small,  sharply  de- 
fined area  of  the  Chicago  World's  Fair.  Moreover, 
not  only  the  space  but  also  the  time  was  very  lim- 
ited; this  Universal  Exposition  was  doomed  to  last 
only  six  months,  from  May  till  November,  1893, 
though  I  added  several  months  before  and  after. 
Still  within  these  local  and  temporal  bounds  I  kept 
up  very  actively  and  intensively  the  part  of 
Johnny  Appleseed,  tramping  from  spot  to  spot, 
gathering  materials,  imparting  what  I  had  gotten 
and  put  into  shape,  and  finally  printing  my  results 
in  a  book. 

The  Chicago  World's  Fair  fell  across  my  path 
at  an  opportune  moment ;  I  was  ready  for  it 
internally  and  externally.  I  looked  upon  it  as  the 
advent  of  a  new  Secular  Bible,  belonging  to  the 
grand  disciplinary  course  of  the  University  of  Civ- 
ilization, in  which  I  deemed  myself  not  only  a  per- 


456    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

petual  student,  but  likewise  a  self-appointed  ped- 
agogue, hence  not  dismissible  by  any  Board  or  other 
wooden  thing  except  myself.  I  marveled  at  the 
phenomenon  for  a  while,  but  I  soon  came  to  under- 
stand that  here  was  opened  to  me  another  Great 
Book  of  the  Ages,  which  I  had  to  assimilate,  and 
organize,  and  express  for  myself  and  for  others 
like-minded.  It  seemed  flung  down  before  me  by 
the  genius  presiding  over  my  life's  evolution,  or  if 
you  will,  by  providential  interposition  at  a  turn  of 
human  destiny,  with  a  secret  but  shunless  behest 
to  seize  the  unique  opportunity. 

Accordingly  I  went  to  work  almost  with  violence, 
visiting  the  presence  of  the  Fair  daily,  communing 
with  its  Spirit,  for  it  had  a  distinctive  Spirit  of  its 
own  in  its  huge  organism,  of  which  each  part  was 
a  vital  member.  Undoubtedly  this  communion  taxed 
me  to  the  uttermost,  so  that  I  could  hold  out  only 
a  few  hours  at  a  time,  after  which  I  drooped  in 
weariness  and  my  soul  became  gripless.  Whereupon 
I  would  hurry  back  to  my  quiet  room  for  rest  and 
sleep  and  recuperation,  and  then  I  would  again  the 
next  morning  start  forth  to  a  fresh  wrestle  with 
that  Spirit,  gigantic  and  also  elusive,  till  I  was 
whelmed  down  once  more  into  my  petty  finite  self 
of  brain-fag  and  human  limitation  generally.  So 
the  sun  kept  rising  and  setting  above  and  around 
me,  granting  several  varying  hours  of  daily  inter- 
course with  the  Spirit  of  the  Fair,  which  I  sought 
to  trace  through  all  its  visible  component  parts, 
great  and  small.  To  me  it  became  a  grand  incarna- 


THE  WANDERER.  457 

tion  of  the  Earth-Soul,  both  civilized  and  unciv- 
ilized, for  savage  life  was  there  too  in  the  Midway. 

It  so  happened  at  this  turn  of  time  that  my  long 
work,  already  lasting  more  than  a  dozen  years,  on 
the  Literary  Bibles,  was  practically  finished,  only 
one  of  the  nine  volumes  (The  Odyssey)  remained 
to  be  printed,  though  that  too  was  written.  At  such 
a  conjuncture  the  pages  of  this  new  World-Book 
were  spread  out  under  my  very  eyes,  pages  not  of 
print  but  of  actual,  visible,  new-created  things  of 
a  new-created  world,  whose  meaning,  however,  I 
felt  myself  irresistibly  impelled  to  study,  to  inter- 
pret, and  to  give  out  again  in  my  own  form.  Hence 
I  had  classes  in  the  World's  Fair,  quite  as  in  a 
Literary  Bible,  and  conducted  them  in  view  of  the 
object  itself.  How  many  pupils  of  that  sort?  For  a 
guess  I  may  set  down  a  hundred  persons,  usually 
in  very  small  groups,  whom  I  personally  led  once 
or  oftener  into  the  presence  of  the  Great  Spirit  of 
the  Fair,  to  attend  a  service  in  his  majestic  temple 
along  the  lakeside. 

Little  pamphlets  of  these  excursions  were  printed 
at  the  time  and  met  with  a  small  demand,  chiefly 
from  my  own  pupils.  A  year  and  more  after  the 
Fair  (in  1895)  I  edited  and  put  together  my  stud- 
ies and  printed  them  in  the  mentioned  book ;  these, 
however,  contained  but  a  small  portion  of  my  fugi- 
tive notes,  which  I  could  not  take  the  time  to  or- 
ganize and  to  ensoul,  so  I  consecrated  them  to  a 
waste-paper  grave.  A  good  deal  of  collateral  read- 
ing was  also  required ;  I  needed  for  my  globe-round 


458    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

quest  a  whole  Encyclopedia  Brittanica,  which  I 
bought  and  tried  to  devour.  Several  times  I  had  to 
stop  for  two  or  three  days  in  order  to  regain  my 
mind's  lost  edge,  which  only  the  lazy  turn  of  lei- 
sure's drooling  grindstone  would  again  sharpen. 
Once  I  thought  best,  about  the  middle  of  the  Fair, 
to  run  away  from  roaring  tumultuous  Chicago  to 
St.  Louis,  placid  and  somniferous,  that  I  get  back 
my  nerves  and  recover  my  power  of  oblivion.  Un- 
expectedly I  found  Brockmeyer  at  home,  having  re- 
turned from  his  long  exile,  and  burnishing  up  his 
old  philosophic  ambitions  with  a  new  zeal,  especially 
his  fateful  translation  of  Hegel's  Logic.  I  begged 
him:  "Come  with  me  to  Chicago  and  see  the  great- 
est phenomenon  on  this  globe  just  now,  and  help  me 
construe  it — Come  at  once,  for  it  will  soon  vanish, 
while  that  Eternal  Logic  will  keep  eternal,  being  just 
the  Eternal  in  itself."  But  alas!  I  could  not  drag 
him  out  of  his  own  antiquity ;  so  with  much  regret  I 
had  to  leave  him  behind  again,  when  I  had  regrown 
my  mental  grasp.  Accordingly  I  went  back  to  my 
grand  opportunity,  for  I  felt  that  I  still  had  much 
to  master  of  that  new  World-Book  which  might 
audaciously  be  titled  the  Collected  Works  of  Civ- 
ilized  Man,  bound  in  one  big  volume,  and  now  on 
exhibition  at  Chicago. 

But  look !  In  a  few  months  that  mighty  apparition 
of  the  earth 's  grandeur  had  vanished,  utterly  tran- 
sitory in  outer  material  semblance,  like  a  magic  city 
of  dreamland.  But  its  Idea  abides  and  will  abide, 
being  eternally  creative,  for  I  find  it  still  at  work 


GOETHE  AND  DANTE.  459 

more  than  ever,  producing  new  structures  of  itself 
not  only  here  in  its  original  home  but  in  places  far 
remote  from  Chicago.  So  I  yet  take  my  delight  over 
that  colossal  manifestation  of  the  Eternal  in  the 
very  heart  of  the  Ephemeral,  and  just  through  the 
Ephemeral. 

After  the  "World's  Fair  my  old  wanderlust  did 
not  cease  at  once,  though  it  gave  many  a  sign  of 
being  on  the  wane.  The  three  foregoing  phases  of 
the  wanderer  in  his  personal  activity  and  develop- 
ment had  reached  their  printed  self-expression  in 
books,  and  with  this  result  the  Epoch  had  begun  to 
face  toward  its  finality.  The  apostolate  of  the 
Literary  Bibles  had  not  yet  ended,  though  it  too 
had  rounded  its  meridian,  and  was  verging  toward 
sunset.  As  this  biblical  topic  is  the  central,  all- 
pervasive  one  of  these  years,  it  may  be  allowed  to 
make  a  new  shift  in  its  panorama,  as  it  unrolls  the 
varied  picture-gallery  of  our  St.  Louis  Movement. 


Goethe  and  Dante 

These  two  Literary  Bibles  we  would  now  pair 
together  more  closely,  employing  the  names  of  the 
authors  whose  greatest  books  are  known  respective- 
ly as  Faust  and  The  Divine  Comedy.  For  it  is  our 
experience  that  they  stand  in  a  more  immediate 
relation  to  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  and  produced 
a  more  direct  and  intensive  influence  upon  it  than 


460    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

the  other  pair,  Homer  and  Shakespeare,  the  Greek 
and  the  English  Literary  Bibles,  of  which  we  have 
hitherto  given  some  account.  This  rather  unex- 
pected fact  is  worthy  of  a  brief  consideration. 

First  we  may  set  down  that  these  two  authors 
with  their  Great  Books  are  born  of  and  represent 
the  grand  dualism  of  the  Teutonic  and  the  Ro- 
manic, which  we  have  already  noted  as  lying  in 
the  background,  and  moving  with  the  evolution,  of 
St.  Louis  herself.  Her  origin  and  early  history 
belong  to  France  and  Spain,  Romanic  peoples, 
which  were  later  overborne  and  largely  submerged 
by  Teutonic  peoples,  first  the  Anglo-Saxon,  and 
then  the  German.  When  I  in  1864  touched  the 
soil  of  this  city  and  began  to  look  about  me,  I  felt 
and  saw  these  two  racial  elements,  and  their  cul- 
tural differences  shading  into  antagonism;  Goethe, 
the  German,  and  Dante  the  Italian  were  already 
here  in  their  original  European  pre-suppositions  of 
race  and  culture,  planted  as  it  were  in  the  civic 
folk-soul  itself. 

Moreover  the  new  and  last  phase  of  the  world- 
old  conflict  between  Teutonia  and  Roma  was  then 
brewing  in  Europe,  and  had  soon  to  be  fought  out 
again  in  the  Franco-Prussian  "War.  An  echo  of 
that  conflict  thrilled  through  St.  Louis,  and  stirred 
up  its  double  nature  to  a  corresponding  internal 
struggle,  which  showed  itself  in  strong  feelings  and 
words,  though  not  in  violent  deeds.  The  time 
tallied  with  that  of  our  young  St.  Louis  Movement, 
which  had  in  it  somewhat  of  both  sides,  though 


OOETHE  AND  DANTE.  461 

the  preponderance  was  decidedly  Teutonic.  Hence 
Goethe  became  for  us  and  to  a  degree  for  the  city 
the  Epoch's  poetical  expression,  though  Dante 
failed  not,  and  somewhat  later  found  his  devoted 
band  of  apostles.  Indeed,  I  think  I  know  the 
time  when  I  saw  Harris  pass  over  from  Goethe  to 
Dante,  foreshowing  a  profound  change  in  his  spir- 
itual evolution. 

I  may  add  here  that  in  our  philosophical  group 
the  two  leaders  divided  on  these  two  world-poets. 
Brockmeyer  found  his   poetic   bible   in    Goethe's 
Faust,  and  really  had   none   other;   Harris   took 
Dante's  Divine  Comedy  to  his  heart  as  well  as  to 
his  intellect,  though  he  studied  Faust  and  talked 
about  it  and  wrote  upon  it  not  a  little.    Once  and 
only  once  I  heard  these  two  protagonists  in  a  hot 
word-combat  over  their  favorites.     Dante  in  the 
course  of  years  became  a  kind  of  father-confessor 
to  Harris,  and  deeply  indoctrinated  him  in  medieval 
theology,   over  which   he   specially  wrought   and 
pondered  during  his  leisure  years  at  Concord.     I 
have  often  reveried  that  the  basic  spiritual  traits 
of  these  two  men  could  be  glimpsed  in  this  choice 
of  theirs,  since  Faust  is  justly  called  the  great 
philosophic   poem,    and    the    Divine    Comedy   the 
great  religious  poem  of  Europe.    For  underneath 
all  his  philosophy  Harris,   as  a  right  New-Eng- 
lander,  would  reveal  his  religious  Puritanic  sub- 
structure, while  Brockmeyer  to  the  last  drop  of 
him  was  consciously  the  German  philosopher  (gen- 
uine sample  of  the  philosophus  teutonicus),  with 


462    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

small  claim  to  any  form  of  religiosity.  But  un- 
conscious and  unrealized  lay  yet  deeper  his  poetic 
strain.  Still  the  two  friends  co-wrought  harmoni- 
ously in  an  apostolic  zeal  for  Hegel's  philosophy, 
especially  for  that  one  Book  of  Fate,  Hegel's 
Logic.  It  lurked  in  my  nature  to  accept  both 
Goethe  and  Dante,  each  in  his  own  worth,  and  to 
seek  their  final  co-ordination  as  two  Great  Testa- 
ments in  the  canon  of  the  one  supreme  Literary 
Scripture  of  Mankind. 

Thus  it  would  seem  that  these  two  aforesaid 
poets  were  genetically  sprung  of  the  same  ultimate 
two  folk-souls  from  which  our  one  city  took  its 
dual  origin.  Of  course,  far  back  both  were  Aryans 
in  their  Oriental  primogeniture.  A  remote  kin- 
ship it  surely  was;  still  Goethe  and  Dante,  the 
Teuton  and  the  Latin,  had  each  his  consanguine 
fellowship  right  in  our  midst.  Moreover  this  bond 
of  nature  was  reinforced  in  each  case  by  educa- 
tion, history,  and  religion.  Shakespeare  is  un- 
doubtedly our  Anglo-Saxon  poet,  but  his  univer- 
sality quite  overarches  and  unifies  both  sides,  for 
I  find  in  him  the  Teutonic  and  also  the  Romanic 
in  happy  marriage,  as  if  he  felt  back  and  repro- 
duced dualized  Europe's  primordial  Aryan  unity 
of  origin  and  spirit. 

Another  point  may  be  here  noted :  the  difference 
tween  these  two  pairs  of  poets  in  personal  appeal 
and  approachability.  Homer  and  Shakespeare  are 
notoriously  hard  to  get  acquainted  with ;  some  life- 
long students  of  them  persist  in  preaching  that 


THE  WANDERER.  463 

their  spiritual  lineaments  can  never  be  traced  from 
their  works.  That  is  of  course  a  mistake.  Homer 
and  Shakespeare  tell  their  autobiography  in  what- 
ever they  say,  and  cannot  shun  their  self-confes- 
sion, though  it  be  very  elusive  and  hidden  under 
many  a  mask,  mythic  and  dramatic.  Indeed  the 
crown  of  their  study  is  the  winning  of  their  per- 
sonal acquaintance  and  intimacy.  Moreover  they 
have  left  no  outside  literature  to  explain  them- 
selves, they  live  in  their  one  great  exploit  of  su- 
preme biblical  composition.  On  the  other  hand, 
Goethe  and  Dante  have  told  much  on  themselves  in 
writings  apart  from  their  two  respective  master- 
pieces,; they  have  written  not  only  their  Literary 
Bibles,  but  also  in  a  way  their  own  commentaries 
on  the  same ;  thus  they  are  openly  self-communica- 
tive and  autobiographical.  Accordingly  there  is 
felt  a  personal  appeal  in  the  first  pair,  a  cordial  in- 
vitation as  it  were  to  a  closer  friendship,  while  the 
second  pair,  Homer  and  Shakespeare,  are  far  more 
reserved  in  their  self-revelation.  Still  they  too  re- 
veal themselves  to  the  persistent  cultivator  of  their 
personality,  and  if  they  did  not,  they  would  be  a 
zero  with  its  empty  circle. 

Concerning  the  place  of  Faust  in  the  St.  Louis 
Movement  I  have  already  given  the  main  facts.  It 
was  certainly  one  of  our  great  books  of  discipline, 
which  we  all  worked  over  and  over  many  times  in 
study,  in  conversation,  and  in  writing.  Finally  its 
lesson  to  me  at  least  seemed  to  be  learned,  and  I 
dropped  it  for  years.    In  1886  I  printed  my  own 


464   THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

somewhat  detailed   commentary  upon   it,  making 
two  considerable  volumes. 

But  now  behold  in  my  old  age  a  sudden  renewal 
of  that  long-agone  Faust,  caused  by  the  once  so 
modest  Fatherland's  desperate  world-war  for  au- 
tocratic rule  and  riches.  How  often  have  I  re- 
called in  the  past  four  years  Goethe's  German 
Literary  Bible,  which  seems  to  forecast  in  a  new 
edition  the  very  eidolon  of  its  own  German  people ! 
In  fact  the  Faust  Mythus  was  originally  created 
and  through  the  centuries  preserved  by  the  Teu- 
tonic folk-soul  as  its  own  right  image  and  pro- 
phecy. Have  we  not  witnessed  another  contract, 
now  earth-embracing,  of  the  German  Faust  with 
Mephistopheles,  the  principle  of  inner  negation  and 
of  outer  destruction?  And  has  not  that  contract 
in  service  of  the  Denier  and  the  Destroyer  been 
signed  in  the  blood — not  simply  in  the  blood  of  one 
Faust  but  of  millions?  And  the  grand  reward 
offered  by  the  diabolic  Tempter — have  we  not  read 
it  a  hundred  times — the  wealth  and  the  power  of  the 
whole  world,  or  its  economic  subjugation  and  its  po- 
litical enthrallment  ?  All  of  which  has  been  told  of 
the  people,  by  the  people,  to  the  people  in  that  old 
Faust  Mythus  wrought  over  and  over  in  thousand- 
fold forms  of  humble  folk-tale  and  puppet  play,  up 
to  lofty  drama  and  opera.  Nor  has  the  outcome  been 
lacking  in  all  its  sanguinary  horrors ;  an  old  Faust 
book  more  than  four  centuries  ago  written  in  red 
German  shiveringly  sums  up  how  in  the  final  bat- 
tle Faust  is  torn  to  pieces  by  his  own  Devil:  "his 


GOETHE  AND  DANTE.  465 

eyes,  teeth  and  brains  with  much  blood  spirted 
about"  were  found  scattered  on  the  field  of  con- 
flict while  the  rest  of  his  carcass  was  invisibly  tossed 
on  a  dung  heap.  Such  was  the  old  barbaric  legend 
uncannily  suggestive  of  to-day.  I  have  often  asked 
myself:  "Must  not  Goethe's  Faust  be  now  not 
only  re-read  but  re-written,  in  the  light  of  this  new 
world-experience — the  individual  Faust  being  up- 
risen to  the  national  Faust,  with  his  contract  still 
signed  in  blood  only  yesterday  on  a  hundred  fields 
of  battle?" 

So  I  seem  to  myself  to  have  lived  through  an- 
other significant  stage  in  the  Teutonic  evolution  of 
that  still  creative,  self-reproducing  Faust  Mythus, 
which  again  comes  knocking  on  my  brain-pan  for 
a  fresh  utterance.  But  alas!  the  ever-young  Muse 
now  flouts  her  aged  lover,  smiling  him  a  teaseful 
good-bye. 

Hark !  the  moment  has  struck  twice  already,  ad- 
monishing me  to  hurry  on  to  Dante,  the  other 
Literary  Bible,  the  Romanic  or  medieval  Latin 
representative,  who  imparted  for  years  his  stern, 
deep  discipline  to  the  St.  Louis  Movement  in  several 
surprising  ways.  Let  us  take  to  mind  at  the  start 
the  fundamental  contrast  between  the  other-world- 
liness  of  Divine  Comedy  and  the  this-worldliness  of 
Faust.  Responsibility  and  punishment  in  the  fu- 
ture for  the  deed  done  here  and  now  reveal  the 
stress  of  Dante's  soul,  since  he  throws  the  action 
of  his  whole  poem  into  that  retributive  day  (dies 
ilia)  over  the  border,  while  Faust  in  the  sweep  of 


466    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

his  negation  obliterates  the  Begond  and  its  Judg- 
ment from  his  faith  and  life : 

Das  Driiben  can  mich  wenig  kiimmern. 

So  Dante   led  our  St.   Louis  Movement   down 
through  his  justice-fraught   Inferno  up  into  his 
hope-winning  Mount   of   Purgatory,   though   few 
were  able  completely  to  overarch   even  with  his 
guiding  spirit  all  his  celestial  Paradise,  especially 
that  final  bloom  of  it  in  the  White  Rose  of  Heaven. 
But   the   remarkable  thing  was   the   creative,   or 
rather  recreative  power  which  this  study  of  Dante 
inspired  in  our  city.    No  other  Literary  Bible  called 
forth  so  much,  or  half  so  much  written  produc- 
tivity of  our  own  as  did  the  present  cult  of  the 
Divine  Comedy.    This  local  literature  shot  up  from 
all  directions,  inside  our  Movement  and  also  out- 
side.    Homer  and   Shakespeare  begat  practically 
not  a  distinctive  word  in  our  St.  Louis  Movement, 
if  I  may  dare  from  excess  of  modesty  to  leave  out 
myself.     Faiist,  however,  showed  its  reproductive 
strength  in  us  by  some  scattered  essays  of  merit, 
especially  those  of  Brockmeyer  and  Harris.     But 
Dante  provoked  authorship  everywhere  around  us 
and  from  us,  indicating  the  depth  and  creative 
energy  of  his  appeal  in  the  human  soul.    I  main- 
tain that  this  Dantean  work  was  not  a  mere  in- 
tellectual exercise  or  fashionable  quirk,  but  a  pro- 
found spiritual  discipline  for  our  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment.   Accordingly  I  intend  to  give  a  brief  sum- 


GOETHE  AND  DANTE.  467 

mary  of  its  literary  productions,  though  I  prob- 
ably do  not  remember  them  all. 

I.  The  first  person  in  the  city,  as  far  as  my  mem- 
ory now  can  reach,  to  form  a  private  class  for  the 
study  of  Dante  was  a  woman,  Miss  Mary  E.  Beedy, 
a  teacher  of  the  High  School.  As  a  result  of  these 
lessons  she  wrote  a  considerable  essay,  which  I  once 
heard  her  read  to  her  assembled  friends  in  the 
earlier  seventies.  She  went  to  England  and  took 
the  essay  along;  there  she  showed  it  to  one  of  the 
Rossettis  (W.  M.  Rossetti,  I  think)  who,  she  re- 
ported to  St.  Louis,  praised  especially  its  origi- 
nality. Never  printed,  as  far  as  I  can  now  dis- 
cover. A  second  essay  by  a  St.  Louis  woman,  Mrs. 
Rebecca  N.  Hazard,  containing  a  new  theory  of  the 
Divine  Comedy,  was  put  in  type,  and  is  still  cata- 
logued under  the  title  of  A  View  of  Dante.  Pro- 
fessor L.  F.  Soldan,  later  Superintendent  of  the 
St.  Louis  Public  Schools,  wrote  and  lectured  a  good 
deal  on  Dante  during  this  peculiarly  Dantean 
renascence,  but  I  have  not  been  able  to  find  any  of 
his  work  in  print  to-day,  though  it  may  exist  some- 
where. All  the  foregoing  authors  stood  in  some 
lax  connection  with  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  though 
none  of  them  perhaps  could  be  listed  as  its  special 
followers.  Quite  outside  of  its  influence  doubtless 
would  be  placed  a  course  of  lectures  on  Dante  from 
the  Catholic  viewpoint  at  the  St.  Louis  University 
by  Mr.  Pallen.  The  same  would  be  said  of  Mr. 
Sheldon's  Dante  lectures  given  much  later  before 
the  Ethical  Society.     The  last  two  courses  are  in- 


468    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

teresting  from  the  fact  that  they  represent  quite 
the  extreme  poles  of  religion — each  opposite  being 
inspired  to  make  its  own  interpretation  of  the 
Italian  poem.  In  Italy  a  similar  fact  is  observable : 
the  radical  free-thinker  and  the  strict  churchman 
mutually  touch  their  tips  through  love  of  their 
great  poet,  for  each  has  claimed  Dante  as  his  own, 
and  each  has  commented  upon  him  with  partisan 
unction. 

The  foregoing  instances  may  be  taken  to  indicate 
something  of  a  popular  Dante  vogue,  which,  in  my 
own  case  and  seemingly  in  that  of  the  public,  rose 
up  to  its  height  after  the  Faust  wave  had  begun  to 
subside.  But  there  were  larger  and  more  distin- 
guished manifestations  of  this  Dante  cult  in  our 
St.  Louis  Movement,  of  which  the  record  has  the 
right  never  to  be  forgotten  by  our  St.  Louis  Con- 
stituency. 

II.  The  surprising  fact  must  now  be  given  its 
due  stress  that  three  of  the  ablest  and  most  re- 
nowned participants  in  our  St.  Louis  Movement 
became  not  only  earnest  propagators  of  Dante,  but 
devout  believers,  saintly  in  act  and  speech,  at  times 
quite  seraphic  in  look,  when  they  discoursed  on 
their  canonized  master.  His  influence  took  the 
nature  of  a  religious  conversion.  They  no  longer 
seemed  to  treat  him  as  the  author  of  one  of  the 
great  secular  books  of  mankind,  but  his  words  be- 
came a  sort  of  sacred  text,  different  in  kind  from 
the  other  Literary  Bibles.  It  was  a  psychological 
phenomenon  which  puzzled  me  extremely,  yea  wor- 


GOETHE  AND  DANTE.  469 

ried  me,  and  I  groped  in  all  directions,  trying  to 
account  for  it,  inasmuch  the  strange  spell  raged 
right  in  the  heart  of  our  St.  Louis  Movement,  and 
seized  its  most  prominent  members.  The  names  of 
the  three  persons  alluded  to  I  even  now  write  down 
with  a  sort  of  bewildered  gasp  :  Doctor  W.  T.  Har- 
ris, Professor  Thomas  Davidson  and  Miss  S.  E. 
Blow. 

The  three  did  not  form  a  single  interbound 
group  of  friends  co-operating  for  a  common  end; 
Davidson  personally  was  rather  an  outsider,  cer- 
tainly to  Miss  Blow,  and  partially  to  Harris.  Still 
they  were  all  touched  alike  with  this  peculiar  Dan- 
tean  spell  and  showed  similar  symptoms  quite  in- 
dependently of  one  another.  Remember  that  this 
spell  lasted  several  years  with  incipience,  culmina- 
tion, and  decline.  I  heard  these  people  speak  a 
number  of  times,  first  in  St.  Louis,  and  then  in 
Chicago ;  my  interest,  both  literary  and  psychologi- 
cal, bade  me  watch  closely  and  remember.  More- 
over they  were  all  greater  personages  than  I  was, 
all  three  may  be  said  to  have  won  a  world-fame 
to  which  of  course  I  could  lay  no  claim.  I  shall 
try  to  set  down  several  matters  in  which  their 
similarity  may  be  observed,  stressing  their  com- 
munity of  Dantean  spirit,  though  they  could  be 
violently  different  in  other  respects. 

In  the  first  place  they  all  wrote  books  on  Dante, 
and  put  the  same  into  printed  circulation  so  that 
their  writings,  or  some  of  them,  are  still  to  be  found 
in  libraries.    The  work  of  Harris,  called  The  Spir- 


470    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

itual  Sense  of  the  Divine  Comedy,  stands  doubtless 
at  the  top  of  these  productions,  and  has  not  yet 
dropped  into  cold  storage,  as  the  trade  says.  There 
have  been  several  editions  of  it  in  somewhat  dif- 
ferent forms.  Miss  Blow's  Book,  A  Study  of 
Dante  (1886)  shows  her  ability,  but  is  tinged  with 
the  peculiar  re-actionary  mood  dominating  her 
when  it  was  written,  whereof  enough  has  been  told 
in  a  former  section.  The  Dante  work  of  Davidson 
was  like  the  man,  very  multifarious,  reaching  all 
the  way  from  his  often  painfully  meticulous  erudi- 
tion to  lofty  religious  insight.  I  engaged  him  as 
lecturer  in  three  of  our  Western  Dante  Schools,  and 
had  occasion  to  hear  his  best  and  also  his  worst,  both 
of  which  he  never  failed  to  serve  up  to  us  in  doses, 
little  and  large.  Still  he  was  unique  in  his  field, 
and  had  to  be  endured.  His  best  publication  on 
Dante,  in  my  judgment,  was  contained  in  his  Dante 
Year-Book,  the  Annual  of  the  American  Dante  So- 
ciety, the  latter  being  one  of  his  numerous  ephem- 
eral experiments.  I  read  to-day  that  a  good  deal 
of  Davidson's  Dante  work  is  still  in  manuscript. 
The  three  persons  here  mentioned  struck,  in  my 
opinion,  a  peculiar,  even  if  vanishing  note  in  Dante 
Literature,  which  took  its  start  from  St.  Louis, 
though  at  first  I  heard  Davidson  make  merry  over 
the  Inferno  "which  has  damned  my  Aristotle." 
His  decisive  conversion  to  the  poet  seems  to  have 
taken  place  during  his  protracted  stay  in  Italy. 

All  three  put  far  more  stress  upon  the  spiritual 
element  of   Dante   than   upon   the   poetical,   amd 


GOETHE  AND  DANTE.  471 

showed  distinctly  the  tendency  to  fraternize  with 
his  theology  and  even  with  his  church.  In  other 
words  all  three  Catholicized  through  the  influence 
of  the  great  Catholic  poet,  each  in  his  own  way. 
None  of  them,  however,  went  entirely  over  and  be- 
came open  converts,  though  public  rumor  repeat- 
edly whispered  that  some  such  occurrence  was 
about  to  happen.  Several  times  I  was  greeted  on 
the  streets  with  a  friendly  sarcastic  jeer  over  the 
outlook,  and  even  twitted  somehow  thus:  "Well, 
I  hear  that  your  infidel  philosophic  set  are  going 
to  turn  Catholic  under  the  lead  of  Harris  and  Miss 
Blow."  I  could  only  give  a  nondescript  answer, 
though  true:  "You  know  as  much  about  it  as  I 
do."  Once  and  only  once  in  my  private  room  I 
spoke  to  Harris  upon  the  matter,  I  suppose  with 
some  warmth,  for  I  shall  never  forget  his  tone,  his 
look,  and  his  words  which  he  underbreathed : ' '  Have 
patience  with  me."  Half  imploringly,  almost  dole- 
fully he  turned  his  demure  face  to  mine — an  atti- 
tude which  he  never  took  toward  me  before  or 
since,  for  he  was  my  superior  in  years,  authority, 
and  distinction,  and  he  never  failed  to  assert  his 
right  of  primacy,  which  I  freely  acknowledged  even 
when  I  stoutly  maintained  my  own  liberty  of  evolu- 
tion. I  said  to  him  no  more  on  that  topic,  for  I 
felt  that  he  was  passing  through  some  deep  internal 
struggle,  probably  religious,  which  had  rent  his 
spirit  in  twain  and  weakened  him  to  a  broken  man 
for  a  time,  quite  incapable  of  any  vigorous  embat- 
tled discussion.     I  never  saw  those  meek  angelic 


472   THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

lines,  which  now  would  stream  through  his  brow 
and  over  his  face,  in  former  years  when  he  philoso- 
phized with  fight  in  his  glow ;  it  is  my  theory  that 
Dante  wrote  them  there,  and  sent  him  back  to  his 
New  England  church  when  he  went  to  Concord. 

Such  was  the  peculiar  religious  upburst  which 
Dante  caused  in  our  St.  Louis  Movement.  I  had  ex- 
perienced somewhat  similar  excitements  as  a  stu- 
dent at  Oberlin  where  President  Finney,  then  the 
greatest  living  revivalist,  had  made  revivalism  a 
part  of  our  College  course — doubtless  the  most 
unique  and  powerful  part  of  it,  as  he  was  the  one 
genius  there.  And  back  in  my  boyhood  I  had  seen 
Methodist  camp-meetings  quite  uncontrollable  with 
wild  shouts  and  frenzied  prayers:  all  of  which 
showed  strong  physical  reactions  of  the  natural 
man,  even  up  to  the  dead  eye  of  catalepsy. 

But  just  think  of  it!  Dante's  poem,  now  more 
than  five  hundred  years  old,  belonging  to  a  differ- 
ent state  of  society  and  to  a  different  faith,  re- 
vealed the  rapturous  power,  not  through  the  living 
voice  of  some  magnetic  preacher,  but  through  cold 
dead  type,  to  grip  the  first  intellects  of  our  philo- 
sophic group  and  to  call  forth  in  them  a  real 
religious  revival  not  only  of  his  spirit  but  of  his 
dogmatic  doctrine !  I  am  sure  I  saw  the  mentioned 
three,  at  different  times  when  speaking  under  his 
or  similar  inspiration,  roll  their  eyes  heavenward,' 
change  to  a  saintly  tone  their  native  voice,  and 
transfigure  their  features,  so  that  they  brought 
vividly  to  my  mind  the  glorified  faces  of  Fra  An- 


GOETHE  AND  DANTE.  473 

gelico's  pictured  Saints,  up  to  which  I  once  gazed 
for  hours  in  the  Cathedral  of  Orvieto.  But  when 
Tom  Davidson,  lecturing  on  the  Paradiso,  assumed 
the  paradisaical  mien  and  intonation,  I  could  not 
help  recalling,  for  the  contrast  grilled  me  some- 
what, his  blue  strabismic  Mephistophelian  leer  and 
sneer  at  Christianism  compared  with  Hellenism  as 
was  his  wont  in  his  earlier  St.  Louis  days.  But 
Davidson  was  honest  even  in  his  manifold  muta- 
bilities; he  was  no  hypocrite,  rather  the  contrary, 
being  often  too  imprudent  in  letting  his  ever-spout- 
ing tongue  pump  out  the  bottom  of  his  heart. 

What  is  the  cause  of  such  an  occurrence,  or  per- 
chance dispensation?  What  may  be  the  psychlogy 
of  the  human  Psyche  in  this  episode?  The  answer 
we  shall  have  to  wait  for  at  present.  Meanwhile  I 
hear  from  the  reader  another  interrogation  to  which 
a  response  is  now  due :  What  was  your  part  in  this 
strangest  phasis  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement? 

III.  I  can  say  at  the  start  that  I  escaped  from 
the  described  contagion,  if  such  it  may  be  called, 
though  I  had  my  own  deep  and  lasting  experience 
with  Dante  in  my  distinctive  way.  But  why  should 
I  be  immune  ?  That  is  indeed  something  of  a  prob- 
lem, with  different  possible  answers.  My  own  view 
is  that  Dante  was  for  me  but  one  book  in  the  total 
canon  of  the  Literary  Bibles,  being  the  last  one  by 
me  biblically  studied  and  wrought  out,  so  that  it 
did  not  in  my  case  usurp  the  place  of  the  others. 
It  was  for  me  of  equal  worth  and  authority  with 
the  rest,   all   four  forming  together  the   Summa 


474    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

Literaturae  of  Europe,  the  grand  Literary  Organon 
probably  of  the  race.  But  the  three  very  capable 
people  above  mentioned  were  spiritually  moulded 
by  that  one  book  of  Dante  though  they  read  and 
studied  likewise  Homer,  Shakespeare  and  Goethe. 
Still  this  was  with  them  more,  I  believe,  a  learning 
from  the  outside,  even  if  deep  and  sympathetic. 

Now  they  naturally  were  not  going  to  acknowl- 
edge any  such  distinction  against  themselves.  So 
they  turned  the  tables  on  me,  saying  that  I  had 
not  religion  enough  to  understand  the  supremely 
religious  poet.  Harris  gently  intimated  some  such 
notion  to  me ;  at  any  rate  he  did  not  invite  me  to 
take  part  in  the  Dante  programme  of  the  Concord 
School,  which  task,  however,  I  did  not  wish,  inas- 
much as  I  had  already  enough  to  do  in  preparing 
for  the  Milwaukee  enterprise  of  that  same  summer. 
Moreover  it  was  my  opinion  that  the  Concord 
School  of  Philosophy  had  delivered  its  freshest  and 
best  message  during  its  past  seven  years  of  active 
existence,  and  had  begun  to  show  signs  of  decline. 
Be  this  as  it  may,  I  had  conceived  the  ambition  to 
transplant  it  in  its  literary  development  to  the 
spiritual  soil  of  the  West,  whence  it  had  largely 
originated. 

In  St.  Louis,  however,  Miss  Blow  chose  to  enter 
upon  an  active  campaign  against  my  supposed 
religious  shortcomings,  and  openly  declared  that  I 
could  not  be  allowed  to  teach  her  class  in  Dante 
the  coming  season.  She  gave  out  that  she  was  going 
to  take  it  herself,  and  intimated  that  she  would 


GOETHE  AND  DANTE.  475 

henceforth  have  charge  of  the  other  literary  books 
— a  decision  to  which  I  felt  no  objection,  for  it 
seemed  to  indicate  a  continuance  of  the  work.  So 
far  she  was  within  her  right,  even  if  somewhat  in- 
quisitorial, which  native  gift  she  could  not  help 
exercising.  But  in  her  reaction  she  intensified  her 
damnation  almost  to  a  curse,  proclaiming  to  her 
pupils,  who  had  been  also  mine  for  several  years, 
that  I  had  nothing  more  to  give,  being  totally 
drained  out,  exhausted  to  the  dregs,  and  that  she,  to 
employ  her  own  contemptuous  image  repeated  to  me 
by  several  of  her  friendly  hearers,  had  squeezed 
the  orange  dry  and  now  proposed  to  fling  the  empty 
hull  into  the  slop-pail,  which  was  her  wont  in  such 
cases.  As  I  have  already  indicated,  I  had  made 
preparations  for  quitting  the  city  anyhow,  and 
starting  on  my  new  limit-overleaping  trial.  But 
why  recall  these  past  irritations?  Assuredly  not 
to  satisfy  old  grudges — that  were  both  unworthy 
and  resultless.  Miss  Blow  was  our  greatest,  but 
our  f atef ullest  woman ;  both  her  greatness  and  her 
fate  are  livingly  intergrown  in  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment and  cannot  be  left  out  of  its  history  without 
making  it  fragmentary,  if  not  false.  Not  alone  to- 
ward me  personally,  but  toward  all  who  happened 
to  fall  under  her  ban,  did  she  show  this  fatuity  of 
excess,  I  might  say  now  of  autocracy,  which  was 
sure  to  come  back  impartially  to  herself  with  the 
all-rounding  years.  I  repeat  that  in  her  more  than 
in  any  other  person  centered  the  literary  primacy 
of  the  city,  at  least  as  far  as  the  St.  Louis  Move- 


476    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

ment  and  all  its  ramifications  were  concerned.  Dic- 
tatorship, backed  up  by  undoubted  ability,  lay  in 
her  nature;  a  distinguished  lecturer  of  the  East 
acclaimed  her  from  the  hustings  the  Kindergarten 
Pope.  I  have  heard  her  friend  Harris  attribute 
this  strain  of  personal  arrogance  to  her  aristocratic 
Virginia  ancestry,  wherein  he  may  have  shown  his 
New  England  prejudice.  I  stayed  away  from  St. 
Louis  about  four  years  at  this  time;  then  I  came 
back  in  response  to  an  urgent  call,  of  course  not 
hers.  And  what  a  cataclysmic  overturn  did  I  wit- 
ness all  around  me,  a  seeming  Kindergarten  Rag- 
narok,  amid  whose  ruins  lay  prostrate  the  fateful 
Miss  Blow !  But  that  is  ahead  of  us,  let  us  go 
back. 

These  unfavorable  opinions  concerning  my  Dante 
instruction  were  well  dispersed  through  the  city, 
and  I  found  them  also  borne  outside — they  were 
flung  into  my  face  by  a  person  in  Chicago  when  I 
was  working  up  Dante  there.  The  general  sum- 
mary ran  that  I  was  too  much  of  a  Heathen  to 
teach  a  Christian  poet  to  Christians.  The  intention 
was  probably  to  discourage  me  from  tackling  a  sub- 
ject for  which  I  was  supposed  to  be  constitutionally 
unfitted.  For  it  was  known  from  my  talks  that 
Dante  was  one  of  my  Literary  Bibles,  all  of  which 
I  designed  to  co-ordinate,  to  interpret  anew,  and  to 
propagate  by  word,  deed,  and  writ.  Now  this 
critical  counterblast,  instead  of  cooling  me  off, 
heated  all  the  mettle  in  me  white-hot  with  new 
resolution  and  even  defiance.     Secretly  I  thought 


GOETHE  AND  DANTE.  477 

too  that  there  might  be  some  jealousy  on  the  part 
of  those  of  our  St.  Louis  Movement  who  had  al- 
ready written  on  Dante  and  so  regarded  me  as  an 
intruder.  Moreover  my  studies  soon  uncovered  the 
fact  that  there  were  rich  mines  still  in  Dante  which 
had  never  yet  been  uncovered  in  all  the  literature 
which  I  could  find  on  the  subject.  I  explored  the 
accessible  comments  in  English,  German  and  Ital- 
ian. Particularly  I  poured  over  the  two  most 
widely  read  and  most  highly  praised  Dante  inter- 
pretations of  that  time  written  in  English,  those 
of  James  Russell  Lowell  and  of  Dean  Church. 
Finely  worded,  suggestive,  morally  and  religiously 
edifying  were  these  essays  and  many  others  after 
their  pattern ;  the  best  of  this  sort  that  I  ever  read 
came  from  the  pen  of  the  Italian-writing  Perez, 
name  otherwise  unknown  to  me  but  still  treasured 
by  my  grateful  memory.  I  may  here  say  that  our 
St.  Louis  interpreters  above  mentioned  belonged  to 
the  same  general  class:  they  were  ethical  and  reli- 
gious, though  each  took  his  or  her  own  way — the 
three  women  and  the  three  men — more  or  less. 

Now  this  aspect  of  Dante  is  not  to  be  neglected, 
and  I  by  no  means  overlooked  it,  being  the  most 
obvious  and  outwardly  impressive  lesson  of  his 
book.  Still  there  lay  in  him  for  me  a  deeper  prob- 
lem :  that  peculiar  unearthly  symbolism — not  so 
much  the  what  of  it,  as  the  whence  and  the  why  of 
it.  How  did  it  come  to  be,  and  how  can  I  probe  to 
the  source  of  these  marvelous  metamorphoses,  espe- 
cially of  the  Inferno?     For  that  beautiful  Greek 


478    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

world  of  mine  is  here  put  through  the  medieval 
Dantean  alembic,  and  turns  to  a  frightful  monster. 
I,  just  because  of  my  previous  classic  proclivities, 
felt  the  greater  shock  of  it,  and  was  desperately  de- 
termined to  find  the  reason — the  reason  why  that 
upper  serene  existence  of  the  old  Gods  should  by 
a  penstroke  of  time  be  horribleized  into  this  nether- 
most Pandemonium.  So  I  worked  away  till  I  too 
along  with  Dante  could  see  bright  plastic  forms  of 
Heathen  Hellas  transmuting  themselves  through  a 
new  world-consciousness  into  the  dark  monstrous 
shapes  of  Christian  Hell.  Such  indeed  was  Dante's 
deepest  poetic  problem  and  its  solution,  wherein  is 
revealed  the  essence  of  the  medieval  spirit.  Thus 
the  sunny  this-worldly  Mythus  of  antique  Greece 
moves  through  Dante  and  his  age  into  the  brooding 
other-worldly  Mythus  of  the  Apocalypse,  which  is 
the  whole  storied  frame-work  of  his  poem.  Like- 
wise the  subtle  but  colossal  architectonic  of  the 
Divine  Comedy  had  never  been  satisfactorily 
wrought  out  and  correlated  with  the  inner  soul  of 
the  work.  Upon  these  pivotal  facts  of  the  poet 
Dante,  I  put  my  decisive  stress,  not  omitting  text, 
history,  ethics,  and  theology,  and  other  important 
adjuncts. 

But  enough !  I  cannot  spur  my  egotism,  great  as 
it  may  be,  and  also  much-provoked,  to  write  any 
further  praise  of  my  Dante  oblation,  allowing  my- 
self only  to  say  that  finally — for  this  was  the  last 
one  finished  of  my  biblical  interpretations  of  Great 
Literature — I    printed    the    two    volumes    titled 


THE  SIGMA  PUBLISHING  COMPANY.        479 

Dante's  Divine  Comedy,  a  Commentary,  extending 
to  more  than  one  thousand  pages,  in  1892-3,  again 
without  ever  asking  that  sovereign  dispenser  of  all 
book-pay  and  all  book-fame,  the  Eastern  publisher. 
And  let  the  reader  now  note :  At  the  bottom  of  the 
title  page  of  each  of  these  volumes  stands  the  new 
device  or  signal  to  the  future :  The  Sigma  Publish- 
ing Company,  St.  Louis,  Missouri,  which  little 
challenge  has  persisted  in  holding  its  obscure  but 
rather  defiant  position  down  to  the  present  date. 
This  fact  likewise  runs  a  small  historic  strand 
through  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  whereof  next  may 
be  jotted  down  a  few  straggling  items. 

VI 

The  Sigma  Publishing  Company 

Accordingly  my  generous  reader  will  here  give 
enough  of  his  time  to  turn  to  the  front  page  of  this 
book,  at  the  foot  of  which  he  will  see  the  above 
inscription  whose  first  appearance  reaches  back 
more  than  thirty  years,  and  has  been  appended  to 
a  goodly  number  of  volumes.  The  Sigma  Publishing 
Company  has  made  a  little  life-history  of  its  own, 
whose  fortunes  are  interwoven  with  the  St.  Louis 
Movement,  of  which  it  may  be  deemed  the  business 
counterpart,  or  perhaps  the  traveling  salesman. 
Another  word  for  its  function  is  self-publication; 
all  the  books  which  bear  its  impress  were  written, 
printed  and  published  by  the  author  himself;  that 


480    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

is,  he  had  to  be  his  own  publisher,  to  win  his  own 
audience,  and  to  make  largely  his  own  channels  of 
distribution.  On  this  side  likewise  his  action  has 
been  often  censured  as  rashly  unwise,  as  crippling 
his  influence  and  lessening  his  financial  recompense 
for  his  labor.  But  he  soon  found  that  among  his 
other  defiances  of  prescribed  ways,  he  had  also  to 
defy  the  way  of  trade,  if  he  would  fulfill  his  mission 
and  complete  his  task.  Commerce  justly  expects  for 
its  effort  an  ample  cash  return,  which  soon  showed 
itself  impossible  in  the  present  enterprise. 

Moreover  self-publication  began  to  mean  to  me 
and  perhaps  to  others  of  us  the  crowning  act  of 
self-expression,  rounding  to  its  last  completion  the 
work  of  impartation,  which  refused  to  be  handed 
over  to  an  outsider  for  a  price.  Naturally  the  out- 
sider on  his  part  refused  his  co-operation  without 
a  price.  Still  to  the  true  believer,  or  to  the  fanatic, 
if  you  will,  the  thing  had  to  be  done. 

Herein  I  deem  Harris  the  forerunner  and  the 
early  daring  protagonist,  when  he  started  the 
Journal  of  Speculative  Philosophy,  in  1867,  to  pub- 
lish his  own  work  rejected  in  the  East.  I  remember 
it  as  one  of  his  supreme  moments  when  I  saw  him 
bring  down  his  clenched  fist  before  a  group  of  his 
friends,  affirming  with  vehemence :  ' '  Now  I  am 
going  to  start  a  Journal  myself."  That  was  the 
primal  creative  act  of  self-publication  in  the  St. 
Louis  Movement  years  before  my  first  dash  in  the 
same  direction.  Still  the  chief  practical  object  of 
the  St.  Louis  Philosophical  Society  at  its  founda- 


THE  SIGMA  PUBLISHING  COMPANY.         481 

tion  was  to  publish  its  own  generating  book,  the 
masterpiece  of  Hegel.  But  it  never  did  its  real  task. 
And  our  president,  Brockmeyer,  could  not  be 
brought  to  do  the  finishing  deed  of  self-publication 
— a  failure  not  the  least  of  his  fatalities,  to  my 
mind.  I  urged  him  often,  both  early  and  late  in 
life;  he  would  promise,  but  he  never  achieved. 
Herein  Harris  again  seized  the  initiative  and  set 
the  example.  Several  of  his  early  books  were  also 
self-published  and  distributed  to  his  constituency, 
where  they  helped  lay  the  foundation  of  his  future 
influence  and  name.  t 

But  in  this  early  challenge  Harris  did  not  hold 
out ;  for  him,  when  he  rose  to  be  the  most  famous 
educationist  in  the  United  States,  the  temptation 
or  the  pressure  became  too  great.  Accordingly  he 
dropped  to  a  writer  of  competing  school-books  for 
a  publisher — certainly  no  dishonorable  employment 
though  a  surrender  of  the  independence  of  self- 
publication.  Then  he  went  East  and  was  editor  of 
a  series  of  pedagogical  books,  to  which  he  was  re- 
quired to  write  introductions,  many  of  which  are 
excellent,  better  than  the  books  themselves.  But 
sometimes  it  was  perhaps  otherwise,  for  he  did  not 
always  approve  of  the  book,  and  so  he  had,  for  the 
sake  of  the  publisher,  to  make  his  introductory  re- 
marks, if  not  directly  favorable,  at  least  quite  neu- 
tral and  shy  of  the  main  point.  So  I  heard  once 
from  his  own  lips,  with  a  decidedly  displeased  twist 
in  his  nose,  whereat  I  must  have  made  a  wry  face 
in  response,  for  he  began  to  talk  at  it  without  my 


482    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

ever  saying  a  word,  answering  seemingly  my  facial 
disapproval. 

My  publishing  destiny  turned  the  opposite  way, 
since  I  kept  up  and  unified  my  business  of  self- 
publication.  Still  my  earliest  book  (The  System  of 
Shakespeare,  1877)  bore  the  imprint  of  a  St.  Louis 
publishing  firm  (G.  I.  Jones  &  Co.)  long  since 
vanished.  But  when  I  returned  from  abroad,  I  set 
out  on  my  distinctive  career  of  self-publication,  of 
which  the  first  book  was  printed  in  1880  (Delphic 
Days),  and  the  last  one  is  the  present  volume, 
forty  years  later.  Thus  among  my  other  wander- 
ings, I  have  kept  up  this  long  publisher's  zigzag 
journey,  going  "alone  and  afoot,"  somewhat  after 
the  model  of  my  Walk  in  Hellas.  I  must  add,  how- 
ever, that  during  the  first  ten  years  of  this  period 
there  were  numerous  variations  of  the  publisher's 
imprint  on  the  title  page;  two  or  three  editions 
bore  the  name  of  an  Eastern  firm,  but  not  for  any 
length  of  time;  the  real  distribution  always  fell 
back  upon  me,  so  that  I  had  to  take  the  whole  bur- 
den in  person.  Several  times  I  put  at  the  bottom 
of  the  title  page  "privately  printed"  or  "published 
by  the  author",  which  was  not  a  good  business 
method,  as  it  led  to  uncertainty  and  confusion  even 
in  my  little  public. 

So  after  a  time  of  fluctuation  I  settled  definitely 
and  permanently  upon  the  above  designation :  The 
Sigma  Publishing  Company — an  impersonal  name 
for  publisher.  The  Greek  word  may  hint  somewhat 
of  my  Classic  time  and  its  productions ;  the  corre- 


THE  SIGMA  PUBLISHING  COMPANY.         483 

sponding  English  S  is  the  first  letter  of  Shakes- 
peare and  of  St.  Louis,  and  finally  of  Snider. 
Rather  whimsical  is  all  this,  but,  I  suppose,  of  no 
great  moment ;  the  true  significance  of  the  title  is 
that  it  stands  for  self-publication,  in  my  case  the 
necessary  counterpart  and  completion  of  self- 
expression. 

A  book  never  was  primarily  a  commercial  bant- 
ling with  me,  but  a  legitimate  child  of  my  brain,  to 
whom  I  owed  a  duty ;  I  was  to  endow  my  spiritual 
offspring  with  the  best  outfit  for  life  that  I  might 
be  able  to  furnish.  The  right  of  being  printed  and 
imparted  every  worthy  book  may  well  claim  for 
its  own  sake,  and  even  for  the  sake  of  its  reader. 
Then  I  found  that  when  a  conceived  work  had 
really  finished  itself  in  my  life,  it  must  be  gotten 
rid  of,  as  it  were,  must  be  disentangled  from  the 
mind  and  put  into  the  world  as  a  real  object,  such 
as  is  the  book  printed,  bound,  and  sent  forth  to 
make  its  own  way  through  its  own  worth.  The 
manuscript  was  to  me  but  a  half  reality,  not  yet 
fully  existent  outside  of  me,  and  not  yet  possessed 
of  its  own  complete  individuality.  I  at  least  was 
in  danger  of  tinkering  with  the  mere  writ  seldom 
to  its  betterment,  till  it  was  fixed  in  the  hard  metal. 
To  be  sure  I  was  not  to  print  till  the  fruit  was  ripe ; 
I  often  had  to  wait  for  years,  and  not  a  few  works 
never  would  mature  for  me,  and  so  remain  to  this 
day  in  their  crude  sere  state  of  scribbled  fragments. 

Thus  it  resulted  that  each  of  my  books  became 
a  true  incarnation  of  my  best  self  at  the  time  of 


484   THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

its  type-set  embodiment,  and  revealed  a  given 
stage  of  my  development.  For  its  supreme  object 
was  self-expression,  even  when  other  aims  may  have 
played  in ;  first  of  all  I  was  to  live  my  own  life  at 
its  highest,  and  then  record  it  for  myself  and  for 
any  similar  wayfarer.  Hence  every  book  of  mine 
is  a  chapter  of  a  life-lasting  autobiography  of  many 
volumes,  which  now  toward  the  close  I  am  trying 
to  condense  into  this  one  volume,  whereof  some 
readers  may  think  there  is  already  too  much. 

Here  I  should  add  that  another  fact  of  the  time 
may  have  more  or  less  unconsciously  pushed  me  to 
self-publication,  namely  the  steady  decadence  of 
the  book  business  during  the  whole  course  of  my 
active  life.  No  doubt  the  trade  in  books  has  in- 
creased enormously  in  bulk,  but  has  decidedly 
sunken  in  character.  Take  our  own  city  for  in- 
stance. I  have  before  stated  that  when  I  first  came 
to  St.  Louis,  at  the  close  of  the  Civil  War,  I  found 
three  well-stocked  independent  bookstores  in  the 
heart  of  town  and  quite  on  a  par  with  other  mer- 
cantile establishments.  At  the  present  year  (1919) 
there  is  not  a  single  fairly  equipped  independent 
book  store  in  the  city;  all  are  annexed  and  sub- 
ordinate to  the  so-called  department  stores,  essen- 
tially the  sellers  of  dry  goods  and  of  other  passing 
necessaries  and  conveniences  of  our  ephemeral  ex- 
istence. Thus  the  original  bookstore  has  lost  its 
freedom,  its  independent  selfhood  as  an  integral 
part  of  the  community,  and  has  become  a  kind  of 
slave,  subject  to  a  purely  commercial  business.   To 


THE  SIGMA  PUBLISHING  COMPANY.         485 

me  that  means  a  sad  decadence  in  character.  Now 
I  am  not  blaming  the  department  stores,  I  believe 
in  them  and  in  their  evolution,  and  in  the  present 
case  they  doubtless  gave  a  little  additional  life  to 
what  was  already  very  sick  if  not  dying.  The  source 
of  this  decline  lies  deeper. 

Thus  St.  Louis  with  its  million  of  people,  urban 
and  surburban,  has  utterly  degraded  and  put  out 
of  business  its  former  independent  booksellers. 
But  this  city  stands  not  alone  in  such  action;  we 
hear  of  the  same  thing  occurring  throughout  the 
West  and  even  in  the  East.  Today  we  read  a  state- 
ment in  a  Boston  Magazine  that  New  Bedford, 
Massachusetts,  located  in  the  most  bookish  State 
of  the  Union,  has  fewer  and  poorer  bookstores  now 
with  100,000  inhabitants  that  it  had  fifty  years 
ago  with  25,000.  The  same  fact  is  noted  of  other 
cities.  Thus  St.  Louis  is  perhaps  only  the  worst 
case  in  what  seems  to  be  a  general  epidemic. 

Who,  what  is  to  blame?  Numerous  external 
causes  are  assigned,  such  as  the  Carnegie  libraries, 
the  Movies,  the  Magazines  and  Newspapers,  the 
Department  Stores.  But  the  trouble  ultimately 
must  reach  back  to  the  shortage  of  brain  power  in 
the  business  at  its  very  head,  for  it  can  show  no 
supreme  man,  no  great  organizer,  no  pre-eminent 
captain  of  the  book-industry.  Inferior  leadership 
appears  stamped  everywhere  upon  the  American 
book-trade. 

Hence  we  dare  the  prediction  that  self-publica- 
tion is  likely  to  increase  in  the  future,  especially 


486    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

over  the  West.  The  Eastern  publisher  will  con- 
tinue to  devote  himself  largely  to  reprints,  to  the 
vast  mass  of  text  books  and  school  books,  to  en- 
cyclopedias, dictionaries,  compilations  and  series  of 
many  kinds,  in  general  to  the  printed  reproduction 
and  distribution  of  past  culture,  out  of  which  es- 
pecially is  minted  good  money  without  requiring 
any  great  outlay  of  genius.  But  he  will  prudently 
keep  shy  of  the  new  book  with  a  new  idea  which 
has  yet  to  fight  its  way  in  the  world.  So  we  prem- 
ise that  the  author  of  such  books  will  more  and 
more  have  to  publish  himself,  or  remain  drowned 
in  his  own  ink-bottle.  Especially  is  this  the  case  if 
he  lives  in  the  West  outside  the  sphere  of  the 
Eastern  literary  centralization,  which  seems  to  be- 
come more  tyrannical  and  grasping  every  day. 

But  under  any  circumstance  I  had  the  combative 
feeling  that  I  never  would  let  my  vocation  in  life, 
verily  my  spirit's  deepest  development,  be  deter- 
mined by  a  publisher  or  his  taster.  So  one  of  the 
persistent  small  undercurents  flowing  through  the 
St.  Louis  Movement,  and  helping  to  make  it  more 
fertile  and  extended,  has  been  this  little  stream 
of  self-publication  which  bears  the  not  very  lumi- 
nous title  of  Sigma  Publishing  Company. 

VII 

Social  Chicago 

Now  I  am  going  to  pass  with  some  suddenness  to 
the  reverse  side  of  Chicago  life;  I  might  broaden 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  487 

this  and  say,  to  the  inverted  or  perverted  phase 
of  humanity  itself.  For  I  had  also  my  daily  con- 
tact with  the  negative  element  of  associated  man, 
with  the  underworld  of  a  great  city,  seemingly  the 
necessary  obverse  half  of  it,  turned  down,  even 
submerged  in  part.  Mostly  I  resided  in  Lodging 
House  Quarter,  home  of  the  riff-raff  generally, 
who  were  always  my  next  neighbors;  indeed  I 
was  myself  a  drop  in  this  vast  floating  Niagara  of 
mortality  which  ever  appeared  on  the  rush  to  pitch 
over  and  vanish  in  the  cataract  below.  Still  I 
found  my  anchorage. 

By  way  of  contrast  let  me  add  that  I  at  the  same 
time  was  living  and  holding  converse  with  the 
best  spirits  of  all  ages,  the  makers  of  the  Literary 
Bibles  aforesaid — the  most  choice,  ideal  set  of  men 
that  our  race  has  yet  evolved.  Such  company  I 
never  failed  to  have  with  me  in  my  little  room  at 
Hotel  Goodenough,  to  whom  I  could  flee  for  relief 
from  that  maelstrom  of  the  unchosen  mass  swirling 
down  the  streets  under  my  window.  So  I  too  had 
my  ideal  boon  companions;  but  I  must  not  forget 
that  I  likewise  was  associated  in  real  life  with  the 
best  people  of  Chicago,  for  such  I  deemed  my  Kin- 
dergartners  and  my  little  band  of  co-workers  in 
what  they  and  I  regarded  as  a  great  cause. 

Thus  after  my  limited  way  I  met  with  and  con- 
joined in  myself  the  uppermost  and  the  nethermost 
layers  of  mankind — the  ever-warring  extremes  of 
the  vast  social  organism.  Or  I  may  analogize  them 
as  the  positive,  and  negative  poles  of  total  human 


488    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

existence,  which  somehow  I  felt  called  or  com- 
pelled to  take  into  my  individual  existence. 

Social  Chicago  is  the  rubric  which  I  write  over 
this  section,  since  I  wish  now  to  give  some  inkling 
of  my  sociological  life,  in  contrast  with  my  preva- 
lent literary  bent,  as  well  as  a  glimpse  of  its  coun- 
terpart in  the  community.  For  in  the  realm  of 
sociology  Chicago  was  as  full  of  new  experiments 
as  it  was  full  of  new  religions,  whereof  a  word  has 
been  said  on  a  former  page.  Indeed  from  this 
present  viewpoint  Chicago  itself  may  be  looked 
upon  as  one  huge  social  experiment,  the  most  preg- 
nant and  original  that  has  yet  been  attempted  on 
our  globe.  Other  cities  may  have  vaster  masses  of 
population,  with  their  special  problems,  but  none, 
I  believe,  have  the  human  diversity,  the  popular 
initiative,  the  social  originality  of  Chicago.  Of 
course  I  do  not  mean  here  ordinary  society,  made 
up  of  pretty  sportive  bubbles  of  fashionable  life, 
with  which  I  had  little  or  nothing  to  do,  and  which 
always  bored  me  when  I  through  some  require- 
ment had  to  be  present  at  one  of  its  functions. 

The  deeply  negative  phases  of  this  social  stream 
which  surged  around  me  were  what  first  compelled 
attention.  Those  three  demons  in  the  form  of 
rebellious  human  appetites,  drink,  sex,  hunger, 
could  be  seen  in  their  destructive  energy  on  all 
sides;  back  to  them  in  some  form  the  social  ques- 
tion always  penetrates.  A  dozen  drinking  saloons 
within  two  or  three  blocks  of  me  were  charged  in 
one  year  with  seven  murders,  not  to  speak  of  rob- 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  489 

berks  and  seductions.  The  drunken  victim  usually 
from  the  country  I  have  seen  lying  on  the  curb- 
stone bespattered  with  his  own  blood,  and  rifled  of 
his  watch  and  money.  He  thought  he  was  equal  to 
the  venture,  went  on  a  frolic  to  see  the  sights,  and 
such  was  the  outcome  of  his  ignorant  challenge.  And 
so  on  by  the  thousands.  Prohibition  just  now  is  seek- 
ing to  solve  this  problem,  negatively  I  think,  by  the 
utter  annihilation  of  the  whole  drink-world  and  its 
far-ramified  organization.  But  much  deeper  and 
subtler  ran  the  cancerous  filaments  of  the  sex-life 
of  a  great  city,  with  its  never-ending  supply  from 
the  very  heart  of  society.  One  may  sometimes  see 
the  first  fling  of  the  desperate  woman  into  this 
"Witches'  Cauldron  of  the  social  system.  Here 
comes  the  young  girl  from  a  suburban  town,  who 
asks  me  on  my  evening  walk  the  way  through  the 
streets.  A  little  inquiry  develops  the  fact  that  she 
is  a  fugitive  from  a  step-mother,  re-enacting  a 
world-old  tragedy.  I  beg  her  to  wait  and  see  what 
can  be  done  by  consulting  her  father.  No,  no; 
she  picks  up  her  skirts  and  off  she  skips,  saying  in 
substance  that  she  would  rather  be  a  white  slave 
than  the  slave  to  that  step-mother.  Only  one  mo- 
tive among  millions  for  the  vast  underflow  of  nega- 
tive womanhood  in  society 's  whirlpool ;  what  is  to 
be  done  with  it?  Reached  it  can  hardly  be  by  ex- 
ternal law,  or  only  in  a  very  limited  external  way ; 
its  hidden  tentacles,  often  quite  microscopic,  coil 
in  the  very  germ  of  life  itself. 
But  the  most  open  and  virulent  form  of  the 


490    THE  ST- LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

social  struggle  lay  in  the  furious  greed-world  of 
Chicago,  probably  more  bitter,  more  energetic,  and 
more  pitiless  here  than  anywhere  else,  though  it  now 
belts  the  earth.     This  struggle  centered  then  as  it 
still  centers,  in  the  world-feud  between  Capital  and 
Labor,  so  its  popular  terms  run;  the  two  grand 
greeds — undoubtedly  sprung  of  human  needs,  but 
to-day   degenerated  largely   into  human   greeds — 
seem  to  be  in  a  life-and-death  battle,  which,  some 
people  think,  threatens  us  with  Armageddon.    The 
one  side,  the  Capitalists,  having  the  purse  and  in 
the  main  the  talents,  employ  brain  power ;  the  other 
side,  the  Laborites,  having  the  physical  preponder- 
ance, tend  to  the  use  of  brawn  power ;  thus  rises  the 
social  antimony  between  secret  craft  and  open  vio- 
lence, which  rends  the  social  organism  to-day.   This 
human  dualism  was  pictured  mythically  long  ago 
by   the   old   Greeks   in   the   strife   between   crafty 
Ulysses  and  brawny  Ajax,   in  which  contest  the 
latter  turns  tragic — a  forecast  often  repeated  and 
verified  in  modern  times.    And  the  ancient  Romans 
have  left  their  little   fable   on  the  same  subject, 
usually  known  as  the  strife  between  the  Belly  and 
the  Members,  a  petty  squib  told  to  the  revolting 
plebs   of  Rome   by   that   old   humorist   Menenius 
Agrippa,  and  after  him  redacted  and  amplified  for 
all  time  by  William  Shakespeare.    But  in  our  mod- 
ern era  the  Belly  and  the  Members  have  formed  a 
coalition   and  have   a  common   antagonist   in   the 
Brain,  which,  in  its  turn  often  plays  tyrant  and 
even  destroyer  of  its  brother  in  the  social  organism. 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  491 

Such  is,  then,  our  real  Gigantomachia,  the  re- 
volt of  the  suppressed  nether  Powers  against  the 
upper  Olympian  rule  of  Zeus;  or  more  prosaically 
we  may  see  here  a  phase  of  the  timeless  conflict  be- 
tween Brawn  and  Brain.  The  present  domination 
of  the  Russian  Proletariat  tends  to  turn  on  some 
such  conflict,  though  our  information  is  still  hazy, 
and  not  infrequently  seems  doctored  by  the  Press. 

After  a  mild  way  I  participated  in  this  war  of 
the  two  opposing  human  Greeds  which  cleft  the 
social  body  like  some  avenging  sword  of  Nemesis. 
I  attended  the  meetings  of  both  sides,  read  their 
literature,  heard  their  orators  on  the  street  corners 
and  in  the  halls.  I  recollect  that  during  this  time 
I  grappled  with  Karl  Marx's  big  yet  unfinished  and 
unfinishable  book  on  ' '  Capital, ' '  searching  not  alone 
for  its  explicit  doctrine  but  for  its  deeper  spirit 
both  in  the  original  German  and  in  the  English 
translation.  For  however  we  may  regard  him,  Marx 
has  written  the  Bible  of  theWorld's  Proletariat, 
which  is  getting  to  be  not  merely  the  economic  but 
the  political  problem  of  the  age. 

On  the  whole,  I  sided  with  both,  and  yet  with 
neither,  for  I  thought  I  saw  something  above  both, 
of  which  they  were  but  the  present  conflicting 
halves.  Moreover,  I  had  neither  of  the  two  Greeds, 
and  in  fact  had  neither  of  the  two  Needs  which 
propelled  them  into  conflict.  In  general,  I  had  my 
very  simple  dinner  paid  for  before  it  was  eaten, 
so  that  I  really  felt  no  money-hunger,  and  no 
stomach-hunger,   the  two  original  sources  of  the 


492    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

two  warring  social  Greeds.  But  all  the  deeper  and 
more  impressive  and  more  insistent  became  the 
lesson,  which  compelled  me  to  construe  for  thought 
and  to  put  together  in  one  supreme  totality  the 
five  great  Social  Institutions  of  man,  in  order  that 
I  might  not  get  lost  mentally  in  the  infinite  mazes 
of  one  anchorless  Institution  like  the  economic, 
wherein  I  deemed  lay  the  dilemma  of  Marx  and  his 
followers.  Slowly  evolving  out  of  this  chaos  rose 
my  own  book  on  this  subject,  which  after  many 
years  of  incubation  got  itself  organized  and 
printed.    Whereof  later. 

Thus  I  traversed,  day  in  day  out,  Chicago 's  huge 
Pandemonium,  whose  acridly  negative  phases  I 
classify  for  myself  under  the  three  foregoing  heads : 
the  drink-world,  the  sex-world,  and  the  greed- 
world.  They  all  rest  upon  native  human  appe- 
tites which  exist  originally  for  life-saving,  yet  be- 
come life-destroying,  if  turned  loose  to  their  law- 
less liberty.  So  in  my  mind's  eye  I  saw  them  as 
the  three  new  Furies  of  Man's  associated  life,  pur- 
suing not  now  the  individual  so  much  as  society  it- 
self, which  seems  at  present  to  have  taken  the 
place  of  the  guilty  Orestes  in  the  doom  of  the 
avenging  Eumenides.  • 

In  such  manner  I  stood  on  the  edge  of  the  dark 
infernal  river  Styx  of  Chicago  as  it  poured  down 
through  her  streets,  and  I  watched  its  multitudin- 
ous wrecks  float  by  without  descending  into  the 
stream  myself  in  order  to  help  save  them  as  my 
life's  dearest  task,   though   on  occasion  I  would 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  493 

reach  out  a  hand  to  the  one  happening  to  dash  up 
at  my  feet.  I  was  not  missionary  enough,  not 
good  enough  if  you  wish,  not  Christian  enough  as 
Miss  Blow  might  perhaps  say,  and  as  more  than  one 
excellent  church-member  did  tell  me  to  my  face  in 
a  kind  of  unctuously  savage  reproach,  which  I 
tried  not  to  imitate.  Still  I  had  my  own  divinely 
allotted  chore  running  through  the  years,  which 
was  to  plant,  up  to  the  limit  of  my  power,  the 
Eternal  Word  of  the  Literary  Bibles  in  the  over- 
whelming ephemeral  culture  of  the  city,  for  as  I 
construed  her,  Chicago 's  Brain  was  even  in  might- 
ier need  of  salvation  than  her  Brawn. 

Still  I  could  not  live  in  this  environment  without 
having  my  own  little  personal  charities,  at  least  for 
my  hours  of  recreation,  if  there  was  no  better  mo- 
tive. Let  these  hundredfold  petty  experiences  of 
the  passing  days  drop  into  the  pool  of  oblivion; 
but  I  would  select  three  of  the  more  important  and 
enduring  strands  of  my  social  discipline  in  Chi- 
cago as  leaving  a  lasting  impress  upon  my  memory, 
and  as  having  a  permanent  influence  upon  my  life 
and  work.  These  I  shall  entitle  (1)  The  Greeks  of 
Chicago,  (2)  The  Hull  House  Experiment,  and 
(3)  The  Hay  market  Bomb.  All  three  had  for  me 
a  sociological  character  and  warning  which  I  sought 
to  understand,  to  appropriate,  and  to  express  after 
my  way.  Hence  they  all  have  stamped  an  auto- 
biographic mark  upon  the  writ  of  this  Writer  of 
Books. 

I.  The  Greeks  of  Chicago.     The  name  already 


494   THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

whispers  me  affectionately  a  deep  emotional  con- 
nection with  a  former  stage  of  my  life  previously 
set  forth  as  my  Classical  Epoch.  I  have  sometimes 
thought  that  I  was  born  with  an  inherited  need  of 
Greek  expression ;  the  antique  speech  had  found  in 
me  a  kind  of  re-incarnation.  The  very  utterance 
of  it  gave  me  not  only  delight  but  relief.  Ever 
since  I  had  returned  from  my  trip  in  Hellas  I  had 
felt  the  strange  longing  to  let  a  few  Greek  words 
trickle  off  my  tongue  every  day  in  response  to  some 
far-away  unconscious  urge  of  my  nature,  possibly 
of  my  heredity.  In  St.  Louis  I  hunted  around  a 
good  deal  for  some  stray  natives  of  that  land,  and 
found  two  or  three,  but  they  could  all  talk  English. 
The  great  migration  from  the  countries  around  the 
Egean  had  not  yet  taken  place,  and  certainly  had 
not  yet  reached  St.  Louis. 

It  must  have  been  my  first  year  in  Chicago 
(1884-5),  when,  as  I  was  taking  a  stroll  one  Sun- 
day afternoon  in  the  suburbs  of  the  city,  I  noticed 
two  men  trundling  a  fruit-cart  and  offering  its  con- 
tents to  the  wayfarers.  I  took  them  to  be  Italians, 
who  had  at  that  time  a  monopoly  of  such  business 
quite  everywhere,  and  I  addressed  them  in  their 
supposed  mother-tongue.  But  they  shook  thleir 
heads,  and  said  they  did  not  understand.  ""Who 
are  you  then?"  "Greeks,"  came  the  reply  in  Eng- 
lish. It  was  a  great  surprise,  for  I  had  accidently 
stumbled  upon  two  considerable  facts:  the  begin- 
ning of  the  large  migration  of  the  Greeks  to  the 
United  States,  and  the  kind  of  occupation  which 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  495 

they  had  chosen,  having  already  started  to  sup- 
plant the  Italians.  I  lost  no  time  in  flinging  at 
them  several  of  my  Greek  vocables,  whereby  they 
too  were  much  astonished.  Responding  to  my  in- 
quiries they  gave  me  information  concerning  their 
quarters,  their  employments,  and  their  people.  At 
that  time  there  may  have  been  a  hundred  or  two  in 
the  city,  but  more  and  more  kept  rapidly  coming, 
till  now  their  population  sums  up  many  thousands. 
Everywhere  around  my  hale  old  Hotel  Good- 
enough  I  found  by  trial  the  Greeks  to  have  quietly 
crept  in  and  taken  possession  of  the  little  businesses 
of  a  crowded  thoroughfare,  becoming  the  fruiterers, 
restaurateurs,  barbers,  candy-venders,  shoe-shiners, 
in  general  the  small  caterers  to  the  vast  transient 
multitude  surging  in  and  through  and  out  of  the 
great  city's  roaring  streets.  I  noted  that  these 
men,  quite  all  of  them  young  fellows,  had  come 
from  rural  Greece ;  not  a  few  were  Arcadian  peas- 
ants, and  thus  had  been  precipitated  from  the 
most  idyllic,  backward  country  of  all  antiquity, 
famed  in  old  poetry  for  its  rustic  pastoral  inno- 
cence, into  the  very  center  of  the  world's  mad  mael- 
strom, quitting  their  pastoral  panspipe  of  Arcadia 
for  yelling  and  hawking  peanuts  and  bananas  to 
Chicago's  Pandemonium.  But  the  most  of  these 
Greeks  still  proudly  called  themselves  Spartans, 
and  knew  at  least  of  their  land's  ancient  "Worthies, 
Leonidas  and  Lycurgus,  whose  names  occasionally 
they  themselves  bore,  with  a  faint  echo  of  hoary 
greatness  tinkling  through  thousands  cf  years. 


496    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

Thus  old  Greece  had  in  a  measure  followed  me 
across  the  Ocean  to  the  West,  and  found  me  at  the 
very  heart  of  all  modernity,  where  I  saluted  her  in 
her  native  speech  every  day  as  I  stepped  across  my 
threshold  on  Wabash  Avenue.  The  language  was 
still  practically  that  of  Plato  and  Demosthenes, 
though  with  many  new  turns,  meanings,  and  in- 
flections. Also  these  Peloponnesian  peasants  spoke 
their  own  dialect,  often  hard  for  me  to  understand, 
though  they  always  understood  me.  Well,  some- 
how so  it  was  in  antiquity  with  their  Doric  brogue. 
But  again  I  ordered  my  dinner  in  Greek  at  Chi- 
cago as  at  Athens,  and  exchanged  daily  greetings 
as  I  used  to  do  in  Parnassian  Arachoba,  when  I 
tarried  there  during  my  Classic  Itinerary.  So  I 
kept  up  a  small  continuous  underflow  of  living 
Hellenism  far  away  from  its  home  on  the  other 
side  of  the  earth,  in  some  deepest  need  of  my 
spirit. 

But  now  starts  the  question,  what  can  I  do,  what 
must  I  do  to  help  these  people  for  their  own  bless- 
ing as  well  as  in  requital  of  the  gift  of  their  par- 
ents? Of  all  the  many  foreigners  I  felt  toward 
them  specially  a  certain  ancestral  affection  and  per- 
chance kinship,  which  called  up  a  feeling  not  only 
of  gratitude,  but  of  duty.  As  far  as  I  knew,  I  was 
the  only  American  then  in  Chicago  who  could  con- 
verse somewhat  in  modern  Greek.  This  time  was 
about  ten  years  before  the  establishment  of  the 
University  with  its  learned  Hellenists,  and  before 
the   custom   of  sending  our   Greek  professors   to 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  497 

Greece  for  the  purpose  of  learning  the  modern 
tongue.  With  my  pedagogical  bent  I  resolved  to 
bring  them  together  and  to  train  them  in  English. 
I  went  to  George  Howland,  Superintendent  pf 
Schools,  who  after  his  usual  gruff  greeting  con- 
sented to  let  me  have  the  use  of  a  room  in  the 
Jones  School  for  certain  evenings.  This  building 
was  then  not  far  from  the  center  of  the  great  Chi 
cago  rookery,  in  which  my  Greeks  were  packed 
away,  commingled  in  a  common  mess  with  their 
bunks,  bananas,  and  cookery.  I  went  to  these 
rather  dark  cave-like  habitations,  preaching  my 
little  gospel,  and  saying:  No  money  asked,  in- 
struction free,  no  room-rent,  no  books  required.  I 
succeeded  in  forming  a  class  of  about  a  dozen  of 
the  more  aspiring,  and  was  ready  to  open  work  on 
a  given  evening  at  the  given  place.  So  I  dreamed 
myself  an  antique  scholarch  of  another  Athenian 
Academe,  blooming  anew  right  in  the  heart  of  mod- 
ernest  Chicago. 

But  the  whole  scheme  flashed  in  the  pan;  I  was 
on  hand,  but  not  a  Greek  appeared.  I  hastened  to 
their  quarters  and  found  them  all  moodily  silent, 
and  eyeing  me  with  a  snaky  leer  of  suspicion.  Fin- 
ally I  wormed  out  of  them  that  they  believed  me  to 
be  a  secret  missionary,  Protestant  or  Roman  Catho- 
lic, who  had  been  sent  to  undermine  their  Greek 
Orthodox  faith,  and  make  them  guilty  of  the  awful 
sin  of  apostasy.  In  vain  I  explained  that  I  had  no 
such  design,  that  I  belonged  to  no  church  (which 
fact  may  have  shocked  them  still  more),   and  I 


498    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

begged  them  to  make  trial  of  me  once  or  twice.  I 
simply  wished  to  impart  to  them  the  first  condition 
of  our  civic  life — the  ability  to  read  the  daily  news- 
paper, and  then  to  use  the  Public  Library,  in  which 
I  planned  to  place  a  number  of  books  in  modern 
Greek.  But  I  saw  that  I  could  do  nothing,  and  I 
uncannily  fled  from  the  basilisk  glare  of  that  old 
serpent  of  religious  hate  suddenly  shot  at  me  in 
newest  Chicago.  I  was  at  once  classed  with  much- 
bedamned  Kalopothakes  at  Athens  and  other  Greek- 
American  Protestant  missionaries  there,  who  were 
probably  the  most  unpopular  men  in  all  Greece,  as 
I  found  in  my  journeys  through  some  of  the  remote 
rural  districts  of  that  land.  Still  I  kept  up  my 
daily  festival  of  linguistic  delight  in  letting  gush 
up  in  conversation  a  few  words  of  that  old-new 
Greek  speech  eternally  expressing  what  is  eternal, 
even  if  it  was  originally  heathen.  I  dreamed  at 
least  that  it  gave  me  a  daily  sip  of  its  own  youth 
and  immortality. 

II.  The  Hull  House  Experiment.  Otherwise  well 
known  as  the  Chicago  Social  Settlement — essen- 
tially a  place  for  mediating  or  at  least  mitigating 
the  furious  conflict  between  the  needy  and  the 
greedy,  raging  with  peculiar  virulence  in  a  great 
commercial  city.  Or  we  may  deem  it  a  kind  of  ex- 
periment station  set  down  in  the  middle  between 
the  two  warring  sides  of  that  supreme  social  feud, 
which  it  would  somehow  help  assuage — the  feud  be- 
tween Labor  and  Capital.  I  watched  it  with  sym- 
pathy at  its  beginning,  and  took  a  little  part  in  it 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  499 

from  the  inside  for  a  testing  while.  In  the  huge 
Chicago  cataract  of  rushing  humanity  it  might  be- 
come a  last  islet  to  which  a  few  could  cling  before 
being  driven  to  the  final  plunge.  The  newspapers 
had  announced  the  coming  project,  as  a  sort  of 
Chicago  duplicate  of  the  famous  Toynbee  Hall  in 
London. 

One  day  in  January,  1889,  as  I  remember,  an  in- 
vitation was  received  by  me  from  Mrs.  Mary  Wil- 
marth  to  attend  a  meeting  at  her  house  on  Michi- 
gan Avenue  for  the  purpose  of  listening  to  Miss 
Jane  Addams,  who  had  recently  arrived  in  the 
city,  and  who  was  to  set  forth  her  new  plan  of 
social  betterment.  The  lady  gave  her  talk  and 
others  were  called  upon  for  a  word  or  two.  David- 
son was  there,  remaining  over  from  our  Literary 
School  of  the  preceding  holidays.  He  claimed  per- 
sonal knowledge  of  the  original  Toynbee  plan,  and 
proceeded  to  disparage  the  whole  design  of  intro- 
ducing it  into  this  country.  Moreover  he  belittled 
the  co-operative  life  of  such  a  Settlement  as  clan- 
nish, in  spite  of  his  own  Scotch  tartan,  which  he 
sometimes  proudly  wore  outside  and  always  inside, 
and  he  declared  the  entire  scheme  "unnatural." 
Thus  he  gave  to  that  meeting  and  to  the  hopeful 
foundress  of  Hull  House  his  usual  Davidsonian 
kick.  Yet  Davidson  of  all  men  was  clannish 
and  cliquey  by  nature;  he  seldom  failed  to  form 
his  own  inner  set  in  any  work  for  which  he  had 
been  engaged.  So  he  had  acted  at  Concord,  and  so  he 
treated  our.  Chicago  Literary  School,  for  really  he 


500    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

could  not  help  it.  Then  what  were  his  Glenmore 
and  his  Farmington  and  his  New  Life?  Still  he 
was  always  interesting  and  stimulating,  though  not 
very  convincing ;  certainly  he  did  not  convince  Miss 
Addams,  nor  did  he  succeed  in  deflecting  into  his 
course  our  Literary  School. 

After  Davidson  had  finished,  I  being  called  on, 
rose  and  gave  a  little  address  in  emphatic  approval 
of  the  enterprise.  Such  was  our  peculiar  destiny : 
again  we  locked  horns  in  that  Chicago  parlor,  as 
we  had  done  some  twenty  and  more  years  before 
this  time  in  the  St.  Louis  Philosophical  Society  and 
also  in  the  High  School.  Our  last  tilt  had  taken 
place  in  the  recent  Chicago  Literary  School  over 
Goethe,  to  which  I  as  director  had  invited  him  as 
lecturer.  My  argument  now  was  that  associated 
work  can  be  stronger  and  better  than  individual 
effort,  and  I  cited  my  own  case  with  the  Chicago 
Greeks  as  a  failure,  because  I  did  not  have  the 
power  of  enlisting  companions  and  organizing  a 
settlement.  So  I  bade  Miss  Addams  go  on  with  her 
worthy  undertaking,  in  which  I  thought  I  saw  a 
need  of  the  city  and  of  the  time. 

Still  I  failed  not  to  signal  to  her  my  warning.  I 
knew  somewhat  of  the  Hull  House  quarter,  for  I 
had  lived  around  its  edges  for  several  years,  and 
had  brushed  against  its  folk,  most  of  them  immi- 
grants from  Southern  and  South-Eastern  Europe, 
and  mainly  of  three  different  confessions,  very  old 
but  very  obstinate — Roman-Catholic,  Greek-Catho- 
lic, and  Jewish.     I  told  her  that  she  would  find 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  501 

this  humble  and  ignorant  mass  of  humanity  most 
suspicious  and  most  sensitive  in  regard  to  their 
religion,  over  which  they  knew  that  their  ancestors 
had  fought  for  many  centuries.  It  was  likely  she 
would  be  suspected  of  being  one  of  those  insidious 
American  missionaries  whom  they  knew  and  dis- 
liked from  the  old  country,  and  who,  their  priest- 
hood had  taught  them,  were  emissaries  of  the  in- 
fernal Serpent  sent  from  far  over  the  Great  Sea 
to  rob  them  of  their  last  and  best  hope,  their  faith. 
She  must  avoid  this  first  and  deepest  danger,  and 
make  her  enterprise  as  non-sectarian  as  possible. 

Miss  Addams  rejoined  that  she  was  a  Christian, 
with  a  slight  satiric  thrust  possibly,  and  that  her 
object  was  christian,  though  it  was  not  denomina- 
tional. I  think,  but  am  not  now  certain,  that  she 
also  said  she  was  herself  a  good  Presbyterian.  But 
time  has  shown  that  she  really  is  the  greatest 
Quaker  that  America  has  produced,  certainly  not 
excepting  Elias  Hicks,  and  overtopping  Whittier, 
if  we  leave  out  his  poetry,  with  which  Miss  Addams, 
as  far  as  I  know,  did  not  try  to  compete. 

Hull  House  was  soon  started,  and  I  failed  not  to 
pay  an  occasional  visit,  and  once  or  twice  talked 
there  to  a  little  group  about  Shakespeare,  for  the 
scheme  had  also  its  cultural  appendage.  It  was 
soon  evident  that  the  work  had  struck  a  deep  note 
in  accord  with  the  spirit  of  the  time;  through  the 
ability  of  Miss  Addams,  her  Social  Settlement  soon 
became  one  of  Chicago's  unique  and  much-inter- 
viewed  institutions,   whose   fame   from   that  first 


502    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

little  germ  had  grown  to  be  national  and  had  even 
crossed  the  Ocean.  All  that  in  the  course  of  three 
or  four  years;  assuredly  both  her  personality  and 
the  phenomenon  itself  were  worthy  of  a  deeper 
study  than  I  had  given  them  hitherto.  Accordingly 
in  the  fall  of  1893  I  resolved  to  leave  my  little  nook 
in  the  Goodenough  Tenement,  and  to  become  a  resi- 
dent of  Hull  House  itself,  when  I  found  I  could, 
after  inquiry.  I  promised  of  course  to  pay  my  dues, 
and  to  perform  the  part  of  the  charitable  work  as- 
signed me.  I  wished  to  live  the  enterprise  in  my 
own  experience  from  the  inside  of  it,  and  to  dis- 
cover what  it  meant  generally,  if  I  could,  and  to 
hearken  what  response  to  it  my  own  nature  might 
give.  Three  main  objects  lay  in  my  mind :  first,  to 
find  the  bearing  and  place  of  such  an  establish- 
ment in  the  total  Social  Order ;  secondly  to  scan  the 
considerable  number  of  people  who  had  gathered 
there  to  devote  themselves  to  this  work — my  very 
human  fellow-residents,  men  and  women;  thirdly 
and  specially,  to  catch  the  spiritual  outlines,  if  I 
were  able,  of  Miss  Addams  herself,  the  heroine  of 
this  Hull  House  Iliad,  who  had  already  approved 
herself  the  Great  Soul  of  the  enterprise,  its  creative 
and  organizing  Woman-Demiurge. 

The  first  operation  in  which  I  had  a  small  part 
was  the  plan  to  furnish  to  the  poor  people  of  the 
district  coal  at  cost  price  per  ton;  the  male  mem- 
bers of  the  Settlement  were  to  be  the  volunteer  coal- 
carriers.  Thus,  however,  we,  begriming  ourselves 
frightfully  for  charity,  took  away  from  a  number 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  503 

of  other  poor  sooty  fellows  their  scant  means  of 
livelihood  during  the  winter.  I  felt  the  counter- 
stroke,  when  a  needy  darky,  from  whom  I  used  to 
buy  baskets  of  coal,  stopped  me  on  the  street  for 
alms,  saying  that  our  charitable  arrangement  had 
stolen  the  bread  out  of  his  mouth.  Not  much  time 
elapsed  before  this  benevolent  enterprise  had  com- 
pletely undone  itself,  causing  apparently  as  much 
poverty  as  it  cured,  and  so  it  was  dropped,  letting 
the  poor  world  lapse  back  again  under  the  old  piti- 
less law  of  supply  and  demand. 

The  next  duty  assigned  me  by  the  Settlement 
was  to  look  up  those  who  on  written  request  had 
handed  to  us  their  names,  declaring  that  they  were 
out  of  work  and  in  pinching  destitution.  Foreign 
immigrants  ignorant  of  our  tongue  were  quite  all 
of  them,  and,  as  I  had  some  knowledge  of  their 
dialects,  I  was  chosen  to  visit  them  in  their  haunts, 
thirty  or  perhaps  forty  of  them  at  the  start.  The 
first  experience  may  be  taken  as  an  example :  One 
evening  I  knocked  at  the  door  where  two  jobless  and 
hungering  Italians  were  reported  to  be  suifering, 
and  I  found  about  twenty  compatriots  at  a  long 
table  enjoying  a  bounteous  meal.  I  stated  the  ob- 
ject of  my  visit  in  my  best  Italian,  and  called  out 
the  two  names.  In  response  a  couple  men  jumped 
up  from  the  edibles  and  wiped  on  their  sleeves 
their  well-fed  chaps,  affirming  that  they  were  in 
great  distress  and  even  hungry  for  want  of  work 
and  especially  for  want  of  money.  I  questioned 
them  a  little  and  came  to  the  conclusion,  that  here 


504    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

was  a  fine-spun  Italian  scheme  of  beggary  to  get 
some  free  contributions  from  charity's  overflowing 
heart.  But  mine  did  not  overflow  in  that  way.  My 
parting  advice  to  the  twain  was  that  on  the  morrow 
they  too  should  go  to  work  with  their  companions 
who  had  openly  shown  me  labor's  plenitude,  and 
earn  their  share  of  the  macaroni.  Next  I  found  that 
I  had  one  Greek  name  on  my  list,  so  I  went  hunting 
for  him  through  the  Hellenic  colony  and  talking 
Demosthenic  Attic,  but  the  Greeks  disowned  him, 
saying  that  they  had  no  mendicants,  and  would  per- 
mit none,  nor  any  Black  Hand.  Such  was  the  new 
contrast  I  found  between  Greece  and  Rome  in  Chi- 
cago. To  round  out  this  visit  to  the  modern  repre- 
sentatives of  the  great  nations  of  antiquity,  I  went 
to  a  neat  looking  house  where  a  stranded  Jew  had 
reported  himself  workless.  Judge  my  surprise  when 
a  fine  Hebrew  lady,  well-gowned  and  somewhat  be- 
spangled with  jewels  received  me  graciously  in  the 
well-appointed  parlor,  and  asked  me  the  object  of 
my  errand.  I  told  her  and  gave  her  the  name  of  the 
applicant,  when  he  himself  appeared  in  person  and 
recounted  his  pitiful  story,  at  the  same  time  stating 
that  he  was  here  living  with  a  prosperous  relative. 
My  answer  was  that  his  kin  and  his  fellow-religion- 
ists could  surely  do  more  for  him  than  the  Hull 
House.  So  I  kept  up  the  quest,  being  employed  in 
it  a  number  of  days.  At  last  I  did  find  one  case 
deserving  help — a  poor  French  mother  with  two 
small  children  was  bravely  facing  the  battle  of  life 
under  the  burden  of  a  drunken  husband.    At  once 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  505 

she  got  a  little  lift.  Such  was  the  outcome  of  my 
first  itinerary  of  charity  under  the  auspices  of  the 
Social  Settlement,  by  whose  assistance  I  had  the 
happiness  to  see  something  of  those  old  cultural 
stocks  of  Greece,  Rome,  and  Judea  without  leaving 
Chicago. 

But  the  chief  interest  of  Hull  House  for  me  arose 
when  all  the  residents  met  together  once  a  day  and 
dined  at  a  common  table.  Miss  Addams  sat  at  the 
head;  good-luck  assigned  me  the  third  plate  from 
hers,  so  that  I  could  see  her  and  hear  her  in  her 
most  spontaneous  movements  and  sayings.  Exceed- 
ingly well-poised  she  looked  as  she  sat  there,  show- 
ing the  mistress  of  the  situation;  to  me  her  fea- 
tures and  her  actions  were  inscribed  with  one  dom- 
inating word:  Will.  Not  intellect  so  much,  not 
even  emotion  in  any  considerable  overflow,  but 
resolution.  I  must  confess  that  the  great  pacifist 
impressed  me  as  a  good  deal  of  fighter  in  her  line. 
The  physical  trait  which  still  remains  most  deeply 
graven  in  my  memory  was  a  peculiar  hang  of  her 
head  to  one  side  so  that  she  seemed  slightly  wry- 
necked.  Moreover  this  lineament  would  change 
more  than  her  rather  impassive  face  in  the  play  of 
her  conversation;  I  noticed  that  it  would  visibly 
stiffen  as  the  argument  grew  tenser.  I  had  occa- 
sion more  than  once  to  see  it  wax  in  rigidity  at  some 
unpacific  utterance  of  mine,  for  instance  in  regard 
to  the  punishment  of  individuals  and  of  nations. 
Thus  it  became  to  me  the  outer  bodily  signal  of  her 
Will;  especially  it  would  rise  to  strong  resistance 


506    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

in  defense  of  her  doctrine  of  non-resistance,  and  in- 
stantly fling  at  any  foe  the  gage  of  war  against 
war.- 

Some  two  dozen  people  in  my  time  sat  around 
that  table,  and  in  conversation  and  action  told  on 
themselves  something  every  day,  for  they  could  not 
help  it  nor  could  I.  Only  four  or  five  men,  young 
sprigs  of  something  or  other,  were  present,  here  al- 
together the  weaker  sex;  I  hope  they  were  worthy 
of  greater  remembrance  than  I  can  now  find  re- 
corded in  my  brain  concerning  their  wisdom.  But 
the  women  were  in  the  decided  majority  as  well  as 
considerably  fuller  of  years,  and  they  showed 
stronger  character  and  deeper  experience  of  life. 
Indeed  I  thought  I  could  read  on  the  faces  of  a 
good  half  of  them  that  they  had  gone  through  one 
supreme  trial  of  soul  and  of  heart,  which  they  had 
bravely  endured,  but  which  had  sent  them  to  Hull 
House  for  complete  restoration  through  works  of 
Charity.  Now  I  was  altogether  the  oldest  person 
present,  over  fifty-two,  getting  gray  and  bald,  bear- 
ing in  my  wrinkles  the  flow  of  life's  vicissitudes 
pictured  in  this  present  book.  My  age  could  have 
fathered  the  oldest  lady  at  that  table.  Miss  Ad- 
dams  was  nearly  twenty  years  younger  than  my- 
self, which  fact  I  may  dare  infer  from  the  pub- 
lished date  of  her  birth  in  her  autobiography. 

The  hottest  argument,  with  the  whole  set  against 
me  headed  by  Miss  Addams,  flared  up  concerning 
corporeal  punishment  in  the  Public  Schools,  which 
I  held  could  not  be  wholly  dispensed  with,  though 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  507 

the  abuse  of  it  should  be  carefully  guarded  against. 
Miss  Addams  turned  on  me  a  look  of  sour  severity, 
so  I  thought,  as  she  propounded :  ' '  Then  you  hold 
that  the  child  has  not  a  moral  nature. "  "  Most  cer- 
tainly it  has,"  I  replied,  "and  the  best  way  to 
bring  that  out  is  to  let  the  child  feel  from  the 
start  the  penalty  for  transgression.  I  know  it,  I 
have  tested  the  principle  a  hundred  times  on  my 
pupils,  and  even  on  my  own  babes,  and,  I  may  add, 
especially  on  myself.  Furthermore  I  believe  that 
the  chief  discipline  of  the  World's  History  is  the 
bringing  home  to  the  guilty  nation  its  wrongful 
deed  through  war. ' ' 

That  was  enough  for  the  great  pacifist,  if  I  may 
use  a  word  more  common  now  than  it  was  then. 
Her  sideling  neck  stiffened  stronger  than  I  ever 
saw  it  do  before,  as  she  uttered  her  new  Isaian 
prophecy  of  universal  peace,  which  has  not  been 
fulfilling  itself  in  these  recent  years.  I  as  an  old 
Union  soldier  could  hardly  confess  to  having  done 
wrong  in  what  I  deemed  the  best  deed  of  my  life, 
nor  was  I  yet  ready  to  promise  that  I  would  never 
do  so  again  in  response  to  a  similar  call  of  my 
country. 

Thus  Hull  House  had  given  me  about  as  much  of 
its  experience  as  I  could  swallow  for  once,  and  I  be- 
gan to  feel  ready  to  quit.  Still  I  believe  in  it 
within  its  sphere,  it  has  its  place,  and  scatters  its 
blessing  to  many  poor  souls  otherwise  unblest.  But 
it  is  not  all  of  the  world,  not  indeed  all  of  society. 
Miss  Addams,  if  I  construe  her  word,  writ,  and 


508    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

deed  correctly,  would  turn  the  whole  universe  into 
one  vast  Hull  House  for  the  grand  betterment  of 
God's  creation.  With  the  overmastering  but  one- 
sided zeal  of  the  great  reformer,  she  thinks  to 
transform  the  entire  institutional  order  of  man,  as 
it  has  evolved  through  the  long  ages,  into  one  all- 
embracing  Social  Settlement,  of  which  she  naturally 
would  have  to  be  the  head,  for  no  man  could  run 
it.  Thus  ought  to  be  realized  the  grand  panecea 
for  all  war,  poverty,  social  wrong,  and  the  rest  of 
human  ills.  Very  charitable  is  all  this,  so  much  so 
that  it  leaves  out  justice  and  its  institution,  the 
State.  In  fact  she  seemingly  prefers  the  lame 
ducks  of  society  to  its  self-supporting  promoters, 
and  in  more  than  one  passage  she  appears  to  main- 
tain that  they  are  the  real  source  of  all  the  great 
movements  of  civilization  past  and  present.  And  in- 
deed what  would  this  Hull  House  be  without  them, 
and  perchance  Miss  Addams  herself?  Now  I  be- 
lieve in  helping  the  lame  ducks  of  the  Social  Sys- 
tem, and  loving  them,  if  you  can;  still  I  have  to 
confess  that  to  me  a  lame  duck  is  still  a  lame  duck, 
though  one  of  the  Lord's  own  creatures,  and  not  to 
be  neglected. 

So  about  the  holidays  1893-4,  I  gave  up  my  resi- 
dence in  the  Settlement,  and  went  back  to  my  little 
corner  in  Rookery  Square,  carrying  my  valise  and 
also  a  bran-new  casket  of  valuable  experiences.  A 
good  deal  of  the  Russian  consciousness  with  its  anti- 
institutional  drive  westward  I  had  felt  or  rather 
iorefelt  in  the  bud,  which  later  put  forth  some  as- 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  509 

tonishing  flowers  at  Hull  House.  More  than 
enough  of  Tolstoy,  and  altogether  too  much  of 
Kropotkin,  and  others  of  his  countrymen  aflame 
with  the  grand  Slavic  negation  which  now  is  burn- 
ing up  Russia  and  threatens  Europe  with  conflagra- 
tion if  not  America,  singed  me  then  a  little  in  ad- 
vance, and  bade  me  hasten  away.  Indeed  I  have 
sometimes  thought,  that  Miss  Addams  herself,  at 
the  deepest  well-head  of  her  spirit  is  more  Russian 
than  American,  which  she  has  God's  right  to  be, 
such  being  her  own  birthright. 

Still  I  continued  to  go  back  to  Hull  House  now 
and  then,  and  to  give  little  chats  on  literary  themes, 
for  it  had  cultural  sides  which  appealed  to  me 
strongly.  Sometimes  a  discussion  would  spring  up ; 
the  last  tilt  was,  as  I  remember,  over  the  Haymar- 
ket  anarchists,  whose  punishment  I  deemed  to  have 
already  shown  itself  a  great  social  blessing.  But 
Hull  House  was  not  of  that  mind,  nor  was  Gov- 
ernor Altgeld.    But  let  this  pass. 

Hull  House  gave  me  an  impressive  living  lesson 
in  what  I  may  call  Institutional  Science,  chiefly  by 
way  of  question  marks.  For  I  felt  there  under- 
neath all  its  open  charity  the  secret  continual  chal- 
lenge of  the  whole  established  Social  Order.  Such 
a  challenge  drove  me  to  think  out  and  finally  to 
write  out  the  significance  of  that  World  of  Institu- 
tions in  which  I  had  to  live,  and  which  mankind 
in  its  ages-long  troubled  history  had  evolved  for 
me  and  for  itself.  To  be  sure  the  subject  was  not 
new  even  in  my  case,  for  I  had  inherited  a  wrestle 


510   THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

with  the  right  of  Institutions  practically  from  my 
College  days  of  Oberlin  and  from  the  Civil  War, 
and  theoretically  from  the  Hegelian  philosophic 
epoch  of  St.  Louis.  But  Hull  House  brought  back 
and  vivified  to  me  the  problem  for  a  renewed  grap- 
ple, especially  in  its  economic  aspect.  Thus  it  wove 
its  strand  of  experience  into  this  "Writer  of  Books 
for  some  future  self-expression.  And  very  sugges- 
tive of  the  time  is  the  astonishing  career  of  Miss 
Addams  herself,  who  has  shown  the  insight  and  the 
capacity  to  seize  the  universal  psychologic  conjunc- 
ture to  make  herself  a  world-character,  and  her 
work  a  world-cause.  She,  most  militant  pacifist  and 
bravest  battling  peace-maker  rises  up  the  female 
embodiment  of  to-day's  deepest  inner,  even  bleed- 
ing self-contradiction. 

Still  pacific  Hull  House,  starting  its  work  some 
few  years  after  furious  Haymarket,  where  the  two 
hostile  opposites  of  social  Chicago  clinched  in  down- 
right warfare,  and  shed  each  other's  blood,  may 
well  seem  a  mediator  worthily  attempting  to  soften 
if  not  to  solve  the  bitter  strife  between  Greed  and 
Need,  or  more  deeply  between  Brain  and  Brawn. 
In  this  earlier  more  violent  and  sanguinary  contest 
I  too  had  my  living  experience  for  many  months, 
and  labored  to  take  to  heart  and  head  its  lesson. 
A  brief  note  of  this  occurrence  also  cannot  be  left 
out  of  the  history  of  the  present  autobiographic 
chameleon  whose  nature  is  to  reflect  in  writ  all  the 
shifting  hues  of  its  changeful  environment. 

III.  The  Haymarket  Bomb.    Just  one  little  bomb, 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  511 

yet  most  famous  of  all,  whose  explosion  still  keeps 
echoing  through  Time  !  I  heard  ominous  rumblings 
underneath  the  social  fabric,  when  I  first  became 
acquainted  with  Chicago  in  1884-5.  Undoubtedly 
murmurs  are  everywhere  and  at  all  times  bubbling 
up  out  of  some  discontented  souls;  but  in  these 
sounds  of  which  I  speak  lurked  a  threat  which  al- 
ways seemed  to  be  getting  louder  and  more  menac- 
ing. Accordingly  I  started  to  probe  for  the  source, 
and  found  what  may  be  called  a  spiritual  bomb- 
factory,  which  I  inspected  and  watched  a  number 
of  months,  till  finally  a  literal  bomb  exploded  one 
evening  in  the  Hay  market. 

There  was,  at  this  time,  an  unrestrained  propa- 
gandism  of  violence  against  the  existent  Social 
Order  carried  on  by  the  spoken  and  written  word  as 
well  as  by  action  in  the  way  of  strikes.  As  far  as  I 
could  discover,  the  movement  was  then  chiefly  con- 
fined to  one  class  of  workmen,  the  German  foreign- 
ers, who  always  came  to  the  fore  as  leaders.  The 
intellectual  center  was  a  newspaper  in  German,  the 
Arbeiter  Zeitung,  or  the  Laborers  Journal,  which 
I  read  diligently  for  its  record  of  daily  doings  as 
well  as  for  its  doctrine.  Its  appeal  was  to  the  pre- 
vailing social  discontent,  largely  imported  from 
Germany,  and  its  argument  ran  with  manifold  dis- 
cordant variations :  You,  poor  fellows,  are  not  to 
blame  for  your  condition,  but  society  is — rise  !  Also 
could  be  found  in  that  sheet  new  interpretations 
and  applications  of  Karl  Marx,  author  of  the  last 
German  Bible,  the  economic,  and  the  grand  organ- 


512  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

izer  of  Labor 's  Gigantomaehia  against  the  so-called 
Capitalistic  World-Order.  Of  course  I  started  at 
once  to  search  this  new  Scripture.  Moreover  there 
was  one  strong  prominent  character  at  the  center 
of  the  agitation  here  in  Chicago,  a  speaker  and 
writer  of  massive  vehemence  and  soul-corroding  bit- 
terness, August  Spies,  chief  editor  of  the  aforesaid 
newspaper,  and  the  outstanding  figure  of  anar- 
chistic Far-West.  I  pondered  his  articles  and 
speeches,  which  reeked  with  hate  of  American  so- 
cial and  political  institutions.  Especially  the  pop- 
ular vote,  or  the  sovereignty  of  the  people  he  as- 
sailed with  his  whole  deluge  of  venom.  Under- 
neath all  his  negations  which  constituted  his  chief 
mental  outfit,  I  tried  to  dig  up  what  he  was  really 
after,  to  find  his  positive  aim,  if  he  had  any,  to 
reach  down  to  his  ultimate  psychology.  As  far  as  I 
could  make  out,  he  still  possessed  the  German  im- 
perial consciousness,  perhaps  more  imperial  he  was 
than  the  German  Emperor  himself;  only  he  was 
himself  to  be  the  dictator,  the  true  Kaiser.  I 
thought  I  had  noticed  quite  the  same  underlying 
tendency  in  Marx,  though  the  autocracy  was  to  be 
that  of  the  Proletariat,  not  that  of  Junkerdom,  of 
the  lowest  social  class,  not  of  the  supposedly  high- 
est. But  class-rule  it  was,  and  with  a  vengeance, 
headed  by  its  own  autocrat,  who  in  the  present 
case  was  to  be  none  other  than  Herr  August  Spies 
himself,  the  panarchic  hero  of  the  anarchic  uni- 
verse. 
Once  more  I  began  going  to  German  beer  houses, 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  513 

dance  halls,  singing  societies,  which  were  strown 
particularly  along  Milwaukee  Avenue,  where  I 
might  commune  again  with  the  present  German 
spirit,  and  drink  down  its  freshest  outpourings 
along  with  a  glass  of  fluid  Gambrinus,  the  only  God 
of  the  otherwise  godless.  I  tried  to  penetrate  into 
the  most  secret  organizations  of  this  latest  Teu- 
tonic movement  on  American  soil;  especially  I,  as 
pedagogue,  sought  to  catch  an  inner  glimpse  of  the 
new  educative  institute  of  anarchy,  known  as  the 
Lehr-und-Wehr-Verein,  but  I  never  succeeded  in 
passing  the  suspicious  guard,  often  composed  of 
mere  children,  who  at  the  presence  of  any  stranger 
would  run  to  headquarters  and  shout  the  signal :  a 
spy,  a  spy.  Report  further  said  that  this  institute 
was  composed  of  groups  of  revolutionaries  banded 
together  for  the  purpose  of  training  not  only  in 
military  drill  for  the  coming  overturn,  but  also  in 
the  true  doctrine  of  the  Marxian  faith.  So  indeed 
its  name  hints.  And  everywhere  in  that  locality  I 
seemed  to  breathe  an  atmosphere  of  suspicion, 
which  as  I  construed  it,  arose  from  some  unspoken 
but  meditated  dark  deed  which  lurked  in  the  soul 
of  that  community,  and  which,  though  subtly  se- 
creted, gave  this  outer  indication  of  what  lay  in- 
side the  heart,  in  spite  of  all  its  self-suppression. 
A  single  typical  experience  may  be  set  down.  I  had 
observed  furtive  eye-shots  darting  at  me  with  a 
distrustful  leer  once  when  I  was  sitting  at  a  table 
on  which  a  glass  of  beer  foamed  before  me  as  I 
picked  up  a  newspaper ;  Graef e  's  hall,  I  think,  was 


514  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

the  name  of  the  place,  a  famous  resort  of  anar- 
chists in  those  days.  A  rather  savage  heavy  Ger- 
man moustache  approached  me,  out  of  whose  hid- 
den depths  flowed  the  brogued  English  words  with 
a  note  of  authority:  "What  are  you  doing  here?" 
I  took  a  sip  of  beer  and  held  up  before  my  censor 
the  Arbeiter  Zeitung,  making  answer  in  German: 
"I  am  reading  this  leading  article  by  Spies;  good 
stuff,  is  it  not  ? ' '  Then  I  turned  back  to  the  printed 
page.  The  man  moved  off  foiled  but  still  watch- 
ful, whereupon  I  threw  down  the  paper  and  quit 
the  place,  having  gotten  a  fair  lesson  in  the  thing  I 
came  for. 

But  what  a  contrast  between  this  present  Chicago 
German  experience  and  that  former  St.  Louis  Ger- 
man experience  of  twenty  years  since,  when  I  be- 
came Germanized  for  a  decade  or  so  along  with 
the  city  itself!  The  difference  stood  forth  to  me 
very  significant,  perchance  prophetic.  I  saw  and 
felt  now  negative  Germany,  not  simply  in  theory, 
but  in  practice,  or  at  least  the  deeply  destructive 
element  in  German  spirit.  Through  the  articles  of 
Spies  I  seemed  to  hear  chiefly  variations  on  those 
all-telling  words  of  Mephistopheles,  in  which  the 
new  Destroyer  defines  himself: 

let  bin  der  Geist  der  steis  verneint. 

But  in  the  St.  Louis  time  Germany  was  seen  and 
realized  more  in  her  positive  character;  even  her 
rather  negative  Forty-Eighters  had  fought  vali- 
antly for  the  Union,  and  thus  had  helped  do  the 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  515 

great  constructive  deed  of  the  age.  And  the  pro- 
nounced German  strain  in  our  St.  Louis  Movement 
was  decidedly  affirmative  in  its  studies  of  Philos- 
ophy and  Literature,  represented  chiefly  by  Hegel 
and  Goethe,  both  of  whom  show  the  Destroyer  in- 
deed, but  show  him  also  undone,  yea  self-undone. 
But  at  Chicago  I  came  into  living  contact  with  the 
furious  German  world-negation,  which  now  some 
thirty  years  later  in  its  own  Teutonic  home  has 
wrought  itself  out  to  an  awful  culminant  catas- 
trophe, a  kind  of  national  Ragnarok,  of  which  I  at 
present  deem  that  I  felt  the  early  possibility,  and 
even  saw  the  presaging  foreshow  in  that  Haymar- 
ket  explosion. 

It  was  a  little  before  midnight  May  3rd,  1886,  as 
I  lay  awake  in  bed,  somewhat  worried  over  the 
dread  social  menace  of  the  time,  when  I  heard  a 
newsboy  on  the  street  cry  out:  "Extra!  big  riot! 
bomb  thrown !  many  cops  killed ! "  I  at  once  sprang 
up,  jumped  into  some  clothes,  and  hurried  to  the 
scene  of  the  disaster,  where  I  found  the  excitement 
already  simmering  down  and  the  police  in  control; 
once  or  twice  an  ambulance  dashed  by,  taking  some 
wounded  man  to  the  hospital.  I  walked  back  to  my 
room  a  mile  or  so  distant,  with  no  little  meditation 
on  what  seemed  the  new  duty  suddenly  risen  before 
me.  Not  since  the  attack  on  Fort  Sumter,  twenty 
years  before,  had  I  felt  such  a  seething  crisis  in  my- 
self and  in  my  environment.  No  sleep  for  me  that 
night,  till  I  had  found  my  resolution,  and  had  pre- 
pared to  carry  it  out. 


516   THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

In  the  morning  I  hastened  to  a  foster-brother  of 
mine,  then  a  lawyer  of  Chicago,  John  S.  Cooper, 
who  had  fought  through  the  Civil  War  and  from 
a  private  had  risen  to  be  a  Colonel,  winning  great 
credit  for  himself  and  bringing  honor  to  his 
friends  and  relatives.  Patriotic  soul  he  was,  that 
John  Snider  Cooper,  named,  I  must  add,  after  my 
grandfather.  I  found  him  ready,  and  my  first 
words  were :  ' '  Cooper,  we  must  again  enlist.  You, 
as  superior  officer,  must  take  command  of  the  regi- 
ment." "Yes,"  says  he,  "the  old  war  feeling  is 
throbbing  within  me,  something  must  be  done  at 
once."  A  brief  talk  over  a  plan  we  had,  when  I 
left  to  inspect  further  the  situation.  I  hastened  to 
the  central  scene  of  action ;  especially  I  took  a  sur- 
vey of  the  locality  of  the  Arbeiter  Zeitung,  where 
I  heard  that  Spies  and  a  number  of  anarchists  had 
been  arrested,  without  any  resistance  from  them  or 
their  supporters. 

A  little  inquiry  brought  out  another  fact.  I 
found  that  many  veterans  had  come  down  town 
that  morning  with  the  same  feeling  which  I  had — - 
perhaps  20,000  of  us  were  then  living  in  Chicago. 
As  the  Civil  War  had  been  largely  fought  by  young 
men  and  boys,  these  veterans  were  mostly  in  the 
middle  forties  at  this  time,  well-drilled  and  still 
ready  to  fall  into  line;  experienced  officers,  indeed 
just  our  own  old  ones,  were  also  on  the  spot.  Thus 
a  kind  of  standing  army  sprang  to  arms,  or  was 
on  the  run  to  spring  at  the  call  of  the  moment.  But 
there  was  no  need;  the  roused  military  spirit  had 


SOCIAL  CHICAGO.  517 

already  done  its  work.  I  once  more  made  the  tour 
of  the  beerhouses  of  the  anarchistic  quarter;  they 
had  lost  their  loud  aggressive  tone,  being  quite  re- 
duced to  a  whisper  around  the  tables ;  to  me  there 
seemed  everywhere  in  that  locality  a  cowed  atmos- 
phere which  was  oppressive.  No  danger  of  any  out- 
break or  violence  could  arise  from  such  people; 
moreover  their  leaders  were  in  jail,  to  whom  the 
law  was  now  to  measure  out  guilt  and  punishment. 
The  great  trial  of  the  anarchists  started  and 
roused  an  interest  all  round  the  earth.  What  will 
free  America  do  with  such  a  class  of  offenders? 
What  autocratic  Russia  and  Germany  had  done, 
was  well  known.  The  trial  was  open  and  not  hur- 
ried, though  it  was  not  allowed  to  lag.  It  lasted 
some  eighteen  months  and  passed  through  the  whole 
scale  of  the  organized  Judiciary  of  the  land,  from 
humblest  to  highest — through  the  City's,  the 
State's  and  the  Nation's  tribunals  of  justice,  cul- 
minating in  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United 
States.  Such  was  the  hardest  blow  that  ever  struck 
anarchism,  though  of  course  it  was  not  killed,  for  it 
is  still  alive  and  at  work  to-day,  being  continually 
imported.  But  in  Chicago  from  now  on  the  Social- 
ists sharply  discriminated  themselves  from  the  An- 
archists, which  distinction  had  not  been  clearly 
drawn  before  in  the  minds  of  these  people.  Some 
time  after  this  event  I  heard  Tommy  Morgan,  chief 
Socialist  orator  of  the  city,  declare  in  a  speech  with 
emphasis:  "it  was  wrong  to  throw  that  bomb!" 
Whereupon  loud  applause  from  his  socialistic  au- 


518   THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

dience,  mingled,  it  is  true,  with  some  hisses,  to 
which  he  replied  by  a  still  stronger  iteration  of  his 
damnatory  judgment. 

1S0  the  Anarchists  were  tried,  condemned  and 
executed — truly  a  world-historical  act,  at  which  in 
an  onlooking  way  I  was  present  from  start  to  finish, 
and  went  through  its  numerous  ups  and  downs  al- 
ways with  some  nervously  responsive  excitation.  At 
last  came  with  a  bright  Sunday  the  funeral  of 
Spies  and  his  companions,  which  was  to  be  the 
occasion  of  a  public  demonstration.  Again  I  went 
up  Milwaukee  Avenue  to  the  place  of  the  coffins,  and 
watched  the  processions  of  various  German  so- 
cieties forming  behind  the  hearses  to  the  tune  of 
the  Marseillaise.  All  moved  orderly,  solemn,  taci- 
turn; I  marched  alongside  on  the  pavement.  As 
we  approached  the  center  of  the  city,  I  saw  an  old 
grizzled  soldier  in  Grand  Army  uniform  leap  to 
the  front  of  the  whole  procession,  carrying  and 
waving  an  American  flag,  the  only  one  in  sight;  I 
think  all  banners  and  mottoes  had  been  forbidden 
by  the  police.  The  grand  marshal  rode  up  to  the 
old  soldier  and  bade  him  put  away  his  flag,  where- 
upon fully  fifty  young  fellows  sprang  from  the 
sidewalks  around  him,  shouting  "Hold  fast  to  Old 
Glory,  we'll  protect  you."  It  looked  like  a  squall 
at  first,  but  the  marshal  seeing  that  resolute  band 
and  hearing  also  the  hand-clapping  and  bravos  from 
the  pavements  and  from  the  windows  of  the  near- 
by buildings,  turned  his  horse  about,  and  let  the 
old  soldier  with  his  flag  head  the  procession. 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         519 

Such  was  the  deepest,  bloodiest,  most  tragical 
drama  in  the  life  of  social  Chicago  during  my  time 
or  her  time  up  to  date,  revealing  in  its  massive, 
resistless,  ever-advancing  sweep  the  fatal  round  of 
deadly  social  Guilt  and  equally  deadly  Retribution. 
As  I  pondered  the  onward  march  of  its  varied 
scenes  and  acts  from  prologue  till  exit,  I  could 
not  help  saying  to  myself  in  accord  with  my  liter- 
ary bent:  "This  real  dramatic  cycle  is  as  com- 
plete as  a  Shakespearian  tragedy,  to  whose  truth 
for  all  times  and  lands  it  bears  eternal  witness,  and 
writes  me  the  most  convincing  commentary." 

So  from  this  immediate,  actual,  desperate  life  of 
social  Chicago  written  in  literal  blood  and  anguish, 
I  turn  for  relief  and  for  hope 's  renewal  to  the  ideal 
presentment  of  man's  entire  institutional  order  of 
the  ages,  as  revealed  in  the  Literary  Bibles,  whose 
spirit  helps  heal  the  riven  heart  to  wholeness  again. 
And  these  my  own  Self's  restoratives  I  now  follow 
up  with  my  supreme  attempt  to  impart  their  eternal 
worth  as  well  as  their  spiritual  anchorage  to  clash- 
ing vortical  Chicago,  right  in  the  heart  of  her 
furious  maelstrom.  Of  which  work  I  hope  to  be 
able  to  chalk  down  some  perceptible  even  if  faint 
outlines  in  what  follows. 

VIII 

The  Chicago  Literaey  Schools 

If  I  can  only  make  this  section  worthy  of  ife 
theme,  or  equal  to  my  conception  of  it,  I  shall  not 


520   THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

fail  still  to  grow  in  the  good  graces  of  myself  de- 
spite my  age  and  other  frailties.    For  we  are  now 
to  have  not  merely  one  but  eight  successive  Liter- 
ary Schools  in  Chicago,  one  for  each  year  between 
1887  and  1895.    I  may  in  confidence  whisper  to  my 
reader  that  personally  I   deem  this  the  greatest 
practical  single  achievement  of  my  life,  as  I  look 
back  at  it  now  through  the  intervening  and  pos- 
sibly magnifying  lenses  of  three  decades.    Mark,  I 
say  practical,  since  it  was  my  deed  not  only  in 
plan  but  also  in  execution,  though  I  had  the  most 
loyal   assistance   of  my  pupils,   without  whom  I 
could  have  done  nothing.    Moreover  it  was  the  de- 
cided culmination  of  this  Epoch  of  the  Literary 
Bibles,  to  which  I  had  devoted  such  a  considerable 
fragment  of  my  terrestrial  existence.     I  hold,  too, 
that  our  St.  Louis  Movement,  in  so  far  as  it  flowered 
along  my  life's  path,  found  its  supreme  fruitage  in 
these  Chicago  Literary  Schools,  even  if  it  had  to 
leave  its  native  soil  to  attain  its  last  growth  and 
ripeness.     To  be  sure  theoretically,  or  in  the  line 
of  Thought,  I  was  destined  to  move  forward  to  a 
new  and  doubtless  higher  fulfilment — much  to  my 
suprise,  I  can  say,  for  I  considered  that  my  Book 
of  Life  would  be  closed  and  sealed  when  I  had 
written  and  printed  and  planted  my  volumes  of 
Commentaries,  or  that  which  was  for  me,  in  the 
way  of  self-expression,  my  new  Literary  Bible.  But 
how  that  illusion  was  undermined  and  blown  up, 
is  to  be  told  as  a  part  of  my  future's  battle. 
What,    then,   was   this   Literary    School    which 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         521 

bulks  so  tyrannically  huge  in  my  retrospect  and 
perchance  in  my  self-esteem?  Let  my  reader  not 
be  disappointed  at  my  small  description  of  it, 
since  it  was  only  a  course  of  ten  lectures  confined  to 
one  week,  but  repeated  year  after  year  eight  times, 
beginning  usually  Monday  evening  and  concluding 
Saturday  morning  during  the  holidays,  with  an 
hour's  discussion  after  an  hour's  lecture — time- 
limit  not  rigidly  adhered  to.  The  subject  was  al- 
ways one  of  the  four  Literary  Bibles  illustrated  by 
the  best  expounders  obtainable  as  our  lecturers. 
My  idea  was  to  focus  intense  concentration  upon 
one  great  theme,  upon  one  Great  Man  for  one  brief 
week,  with  illumination  flashing  upon  the  one  cen- 
ter from  diverse  masterful  minds.  My  experience 
of  Concord  had  told  me  that  the  sessions  lasting 
several  weeks  were  too  long,  the  subjects  too  dis- 
cursive, though  the  leading  theme  may  have  re- 
mained Philosophy.  Hence  toward  the  close  there 
was  always  a  letting  down  from  the  excessive  ten- 
sion; we  fagged  out  and  then  we  dragged  out.  It 
was  a  prime  point  accordingly  to  keep  that  Chi- 
cago audience  keyed  up  while  the  School  lasted, 
but  it  must  not  last  too  long. 

Still  the  chief  shortcoming  of  the  Concord  pro- 
gram, which  I  watched  with  no  little  care,  sprang 
from  the  lack  of  previous  preparation  in  its  stu- 
dents and  listeners.  For  instance,  I  felt  certain  that 
half  of  the  audience  during  the  Concord  Goethe 
School  had  never  read  Faust,  or  at  most  only 
in  a  very  desultory  way.    Indeed  when  I  lectured 


522    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

on  Shakespeare,  using  some  of  the  incidents  of 
Love's  Labors  Lost  for  my  purpose,  I  found  reason 
to  believe  that  not  one  in  four  of  my  hearers  had 
ever  grappled  with  that  somewhat  difficult  and  less 
known  play.    And  when  Harris  talked  his  unmixed 
Hegel  to  that  mixed  crowd,  though  he  tried  to 
popularize  his  ponderous  nomenclature,  and  did  to 
a  certain  extent,  I   could  see  by  the  corrugated 
foreheads  and  tensely  shutting  eyelids,  not  to  men- 
tion faces  of  relaxed  despair,  that  quite  everybody 
there  needed  some  preliminary  training  to  the  hard 
language  and  to  the  still  harder  thought.    Accord- 
ingly I  determined  through  my  classes  to  prepare 
the  way  for  the   Chicago  School  so  that  its  lec- 
turers would  have  a  body  of  listeners  who  had  not 
only  read  but  had  studied  the  masterpieces  which 
were  the  subject-matter  under  consideration.    Thus 
I  had  actually  drilled  some  one  or  two  hundred 
good  people  in  the  manual  of  the  Literary  Bibles, 
so  that  they  seemed  to  me  like  a  company  of  sol- 
diers ready  for  the  onset  when  the  hour  struck. 

And  the  hour  did  strike  when  I  resolved  to  hold 
a  Literary  School  in  Chicago  during  Christmas 
holiday  week,  1887.  The  subject  chosen  was  Dante, 
for  a  number  of  excellent  reasons.  I  had  my  little 
army  sufficiently  trained  and  well  in  hand;  I  saw 
that  they  knew  enough  to  make  themselves  not 
only  appreciative  hearers,  but  even  fair  judges  of 
all  that  might  be  said.  And  they  had  at  least  the 
Sniderian  standard  by  which  they  could  test  all 
the  speakers.     In  fact,  I  wished  to  give  them  a 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         523 

chance  just  through  this  School  to  break  over  the 
bounds  of  my  doctrine  if  they  found  anything  bet- 
ter. And  a  few  did.  I  have  sometimes  wondered 
at  myself  in  this  role  of  disciplinarian.  Was  it  the 
result  of  my  being  a  schoolmaster?  But  the  other 
lecturers  were  also  pedagogues  by  profession.  Now, 
as  far  as  I  know,  I  was  the  only  man  among  them 
who  had  been  a  soldier,  who  had  drilled  and  com- 
manded fighters  in  the  tussle  of  war.  That  may 
have  impressed  its  lasting  lesson  upon  me,  so  that 
when  I  surveyed  the  mighty  fortress  of  ignorance 
and  of  philistinism  called  Chicago,  I  knew  that  I 
must  have  a  disciplined  soldiery  to  assault  even  any 
little  outwork  or  bastion  of  it  with  the  least  hope 
of  success.  Let  the  pre-cautious  reader  not  neglect 
my  dates,  recalling  that  I  first  appeared  in  Chi- 
cago in  1884,  and  hence  had  been  training  my  peo- 
ple off  and  on  for  three  years  before  the  first  Liter- 
ary School. 

1  must  by  no  means  forget  to  mention  that  the 
active  center  of  my  following  was  composed  chiefly 
of  Kindergartners,  who  had  been  more  or  less 
directly  connected  with  our  St.  Louis  Movement 
through  Miss  Blow.  About  this  time  we  had 
started  a  new  Kindergarten  College  in  Chicago, 
which  remained  the  inspiring  sustainer  as  well  as 
the  pushing  financial  promoter  of  all  these  eight 
Literary  Schools,  while  developing  with  zeal  and 
ability  its  own  special  work.  The  official  heads  of 
this  Kindergarten  work  were  Miss  Elizabeth  Har- 
rison and  Mrs.  J.  N.  Crouse. 


524    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

The  Director  of  the  Literary  Schools  I  titled  my- 
self, for  I  knew  from  experience  that  they  had  to 
be  directed  and  stabilized  by  a  single  hand  not 
shaky.  The  Milwaukee  affair  had  vividly  lessoned 
me  that  one  captain  must  take  charge;  or  more 
particularly  stated,  that  I  must  make  the  program, 
select  the  speakers,  and  preside  over  the  sessions. 
At  the  same  time  my  trained  auxiliaries  must  let 
themselves  be  felt  in  support  as  the  very  soul  of 
the  audience.  I  knew  Davidson's  tendency  to  de- 
flect the  established  course  aside  to  his  own  ends, 
he  being  by  nature  a  breacher  and  always  knowing 
better  than  the  authority  at  the  helm.  His  part, 
however,  could  not  be  filled  by  any  other  lecturer, 
and  I  took  a  kind  of  pleasure  in  trying  on  him  my 
new  well-bitted  bridle.  Of  course  I  did  not  ex- 
pect at  the  start  that  the  School  would  acquire  a 
momentum  so  imperious  that  it  would  insist  on  re- 
peating itself  eight  times  before  stopping,  or  even 
four  times.  I  only  wished  to  get  through  the  one 
time  in  safety. 

But  why  choose  Dante  as  the  starter  ?  Foremost 
rose  the  reason  that  the  old  Florentine  poet  would 
furnish  in  advance  the  best  material  for  making 
the  best  School,  and  the  least  hazard  could  we  dare 
take  at  the  opening  plunge.  Harris  and  Davidson, 
I  knew,  had  excellent  work  in  manuscript  on 
Dante,  which  they  could  draw  on,  and  which  they 
had  already  tested  at  Concord.  Moreover  the  psy- 
chological condition  of  the  two  men  was  not  to  be 
neglected:  both  had  strongly  Danteized,  had  even 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         525 

Catholicized  almost  to  the  stepping  off  edge,  but 
had  refused  to  take  the  last  leap.  This  signifies 
that  both  looked  on  their  favorite  poet  as  a  kind  of 
Bible,  in  fact  as  their  one  Literary  Bible ;  they  were 
not  merely  profound  and  learned  expositors  of  the 
text,  but  were  believers  with  the  faith  and  love  of 
disciples  for  their  master.  Such  were  the  men  I 
wanted  to  give  tone  to  the  task.  I  cared  not  for 
the  usual  sleek-groomed  literateur  who  could  write 
upon  call  a  well-worded  essay  for  the  magazine.  A 
far  deeper  requirement  I  exacted  for  the  Literary 
School,  a  biblical  test.  These  two  men  had,  each 
in  his  own  way,  loved  and  lived  Dante  for  years, 
and  showed  the  fact  in  their  writ.  To  be  sure, 
from  my  point  of  view  they  both  were  a  little  nar- 
row; they  had  realized  only  one  Literary  Bible, 
while  the  consensus  of  the  best  judges  of  all  time 
had  stamped  upon  four  their  canonical  seal  of 
approval. 

To  these  two  male  eminences,  I  wished  to  add 
the  eminent  woman  of  our  St.  Louis  Movement, 
Miss  Blow,  also  a  strong  religious  Danteizer,  who 
had  written  and  published  her  book  on  Italy's  su- 
preme poem.  I  sent  her  an  urgent  invitation  beg- 
ging her  to  be  present,  and  I  especially  stressed  the 
fact  that  Dr.  Harris,  her  tutelary,  would  be  on 
hand  to  help  give  character  to  the  School.  But  the 
reply  came  back  to  me  that  she  was  too  unwell  to 
take  the  journey.  I  was  eager  to  secure  Miss 
Blow's  presence  for  another  reason:  the  rank  and 
file  of  my  fighting  army  were  mainly  Kindergart- 


526    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

ners,  all  of  them  Miss  Blow's  pupils,  or  pupils  of 
her  pupils.  Hence  her  name  was  a  familiar  word  of 
magic  to  them,  and  also  in  her  the  woman-soul 
would  be  transcendently  represented  on  the  pro- 
gram. She  had  done  the  great  educational  deed  of 
the  time,  and  she  desterved  all  the  recognition 
which  the  School  might  be  able  to  give.  If  I  recol- 
lect aright,  I  wrote  her  a  second  letter,  asking 
simply  for  a  paper,  even  an  old  one,  to  be  read  in 
her  name  and  honor  at  one  of  the  sessions.  But  to 
this  repeated  request  she  gave  no  response. 

I  shall,  however,  acknowledge  that  I  had  my  own 
little  personal  satisfaction  in  sending  this  friendly 
missive  to  Miss  Blow,  inviting  her  to  take  part  in  a 
Dante  School  under  my  supervision.  I  thought  that 
it  might  do  her  some  good  to  find  out  that  I  would 
not  stay  in  the  petty  pigeon-hole  into  which  she. 
during  her  autocracy  had  tried  to  thrust  me  at  St. 
Louis.  She  would  also  see  my  enthusiastic  band  of 
soldiery  largely  composed  of  her  own  Kindergarten 
followers.  Even  Dr.  Harris  would  now  do  his  good 
share  under  the  new  Director,  whom  she  had  once 
tabooed,  forbidding  him  her  Dante  class.  To  be 
sure  the  experience  might  be  a  little  Purgatory  for 
that  pride  which  I  had  heard  her  denounce  as  the 
basic  human  sin,  in  a  kind  of  self-confession  I 
thought,  though  fulmined  with  a  Dantean  vehe- 
mence of  damnation.  Moreover  she  would  see  on 
the  program  practically  the  whole  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment gathered  up  from  its  dispersion  and  trans- 
ferred to  Chicago,  as  it  starts  on  a  new  stage  of  its 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         527 

evolution  in  a  new  locality  under  a  new  helmsman. 
To  have  seen  and  shared  in  all  that,  ought  to  have 
widened  her  horizon  a  little  somewhat,  wherein 
might  have  lain  for  her  a  blessing. 

Thus  I  sought  to  collect  the  scattered  members 
of  the  former  St.  Louis  Movement  as  they  lay  be- 
strown  in  every  direction  over  the  land,  and  to 
unite  them  in  a  second  growth  and  restoration  of 
our  cause.  "We  could  not  go  back  to  our  starting 
place  and  try  St.  Louis  again  with  any  hope,  for 
her  city-soul,  quite  collapsed,  seemed  to  lie  pros- 
trate in  a  kind  of  benumbed  mental  lethargy,  the 
reaction,  as  I  construe  the  case,  from  her  Great 
Disillusion.  Still  I  could  find  here  and  there  on 
my  occasional  visits  to  the  fast-ageing  town,  some 
lingering  sparks  of  the  old  fire  which  might,  after 
the  smouldering  years,  be  once  more  kindled  into 
a  fresh  flame  of  her  spirit's  revival.  But  at  present 
she  had  not  recovered  from  that  volcanic  explo- 
sion which,  among  its  other  effects,  had  torn  our 
St.  Louis  group  to  very  tatters,  and  had  hurled  us 
piecemeal  to  the  four  winds  of  heaven. 

Let  me  here  confess  that  I  indulged  in  some  quiet, 
harmless  self-gratulation  at  the  fact  that  I  stead- 
fastly refused  to  flee  backwards  to  earlier,  less  ad- 
vanced forms  of  associated  life  after  the  St.  Louis 
cataclysm.  Quite  the  opposite  was  the  trend  of  my 
associates.  For  instance,  Harris  betook  himself  to 
idyllic  Concord  and  homed  there ;  Davidson  turned 
first  to  small  rural  Farmington,  and  then  escaped 
to  the  remoter  woody  mountain  of  Glenmore  in  the 


528    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

Adirondacks  for  the  purpose  of  forming  his  ideal 
fellowship  away  from  civilization ;  Miss  Blow  cut 
loose  from  all  her  St.  Louis  prestige,  social,  educa- 
tional, literary,  and  retired  to  her  secluded  nook  at 
Cazenovia,  New  York,  where  she  also  in  time  will 
hold  sessions  for  her  disciples;  and  my  dear  giant 
Brockmeyer  made  the  completest,  most  gigantically 
uncivilized  retreat  of  all,  when  he  fled  to  the  Red- 
men  of  Indian  Territory,  going  back  as  it  were  into 
the  very  cave  of  primordial  Polyphemus.     But  it 
lay  in  me  somehow  to  speed  the  other  way,  along 
with  or  perchance  ahead  of  civilization ;  so  I  flung 
myself  into  the  Chicago  maelstrom,  the  dizzying, 
still  crude  human  vortex  in  the  forefront  of  the 
World's  History.     That  was  my  fascination  and 
remained  so  during  many  years.    For  the  problem 
to  my  mind  ran :  how  can  I  establish  a  little  solid 
isle  of  eternity  in  this  roaring,  raging,  ever  chang- 
ing time-stream,  which  might  dash  and  foam  about 
the  same  in  vain.    As  already  recounted,  I  sought 
to  plant  right  in  this  topmost  frothing  tide  of  all 
ephemerality  the  most  permanent  immortal  thing 
hitherto  evolved  by  our  race,  namely  its  Literary 
Bibles.     But  I  needed  the  best  help  of  these  very 
people  who  had  run  away  from  civilization,  who 
had  felt  its  sharp  backstroke  and  had  fled  from  its 
trying   ordeal   to  places   of  safety.     To   use   our 
familiar  American  soldier-slang,  coined  and  often 
needed  during  the  Civil  "War,  they  had  all  ske- 
daddled from   that  first  fight,   each   to   his   own 
separate  cover. 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         529 

Thus  I  rallied  these  fugitives,  so  let  me  call 
them  in  my  conceited  simile,  all  of  them  skilled  in 
my  work,  and  specially  capable  of  performing 
their  new  allotted  task.  They  had  been  themselves 
leaders,  and  they  were  still  to  lead,  but  under 
orders.  I  may  summarize  the  muster  in  the  fol- 
lowing soldierly  nomenclature:  (1)  The  Captain, 
otherwise  called  the  Director;  (2)  The  subordinate 
officers,  that  is,  the  lecturers;  (3)  The  rank  and 
file,  that  is,  the  trained  company  of  hearers  in  the 
audience:  (4)  The  objective  of  the  campaign — 
Chicago  and  its  dependencies,  or  some  fragment  of 
the  same. 

Under  some  such  arrangement,  destiny  decreed 
that  we  were  to  have  eight  Literary  Schools  in 
yearly  succession  at  Chicago,  as  before  said.  This 
half-military  organization  showed  itself  strong 
enough  to  uphold  and  even  to  propagate  its  form 
and  its  matter,  or  the  How  and  the  "What  of  it- 
self. Some  attempts  were  made  to  change  it  and 
to  undermine  it,  still  it  held  its  ground,  till  its 
task  was  accomplished.  It  remains  to  give  some 
condensed  account  of  these  separate  Schools,  since 
each  had  its  own  outer  circumstances  as  well  as 
inner  character.  Necessarily  the  manner  of  execu- 
tion in  each  case  would  be  different,  and  also  the 
success. 

The  reasons  have  already  been  given  for  making 
our  start  with  Dante.  I  had  been  tentatively  whis- 
pering my  design  perhaps  a  year  beforehand  in 
order  to  test  and  to  inflame  if  possible,  the  zeal  of 


550    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

my  classes.  But  early  in  the  fall  before  the  School, 
I  issued  the  first  public  announcement,  and  let  it 
appear  as  a  local  item  in  the  newspapers. 

I.  The  Dante  School.  Before  me  lies  the  old  pro- 
gram, tattered  and  yellowed  by  age,  and  still  it 
seems  to  look  up  at  me  with  a  wrinkled  twinkle  of 
triumph.  It  recalls,  however,  the  many  obstacles, 
vexations,  anxieties  of  the  encounter,  for  even  well- 
wishers  were  everywhere  nodding  no  with  their 
looks  and  often  piteously  smiling  at  me  as  a 
fatuous  visionary,  hinting  ' '  ahead  of  the  age ;  your 
fine  Literary  Bibles  will  not  do  for  this  crass  pork- 
packing  Chicago,  the  world's  greatest  business 
hustler."  It  should  be  remembered  in  the  present 
connection  that  this  was  years  in  advance  of  the 
Chicago  "World's  Fair,  and  long  before  to-day's 
Chicago  University  had  been  thought  of.  But  the 
vast  majority  of  our  unintentional  friends  were  the 
scoffers  headed  by  the  newspapers,  who  screeched 
the  opposite  note:  "Altogether  behind  the  times; 
your  old  musty  books  of  the  past  are  not  fit  eveo 
for  the  commonest  Chicago  wrapping-stuff.  Away 
with  you,  miserable  idealist ! ' '  All  the  more  deter- 
mined charged  forward  our  small  battalion  of  sol- 
diers, and  massed  themselves  in  military  array  for 
the  fight,  just  because  of  the  opposition,  which 
thus  had  the  effect  of  uniting  more  intensively  our 
little  army  for  the  attack. 

Here  the  heralded  program  and  my  curious 
reader  may  be  brought  face  to  face  for  a  little  look 
at  each  other. 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         531 

Literary  School. 
TEN    LECTURES  ON  DANTE. 

Will  be  given  in  the  Lecture  Hall  of  the  Art  Institute, 

corner  Van  Buren  St.  and  Michigan  Ave.,  during 

the  Holidays,  1887,  by  Dr.  W.  T.  Harris,  of 

Concord,  Mass.;   Prof.  Thomas  Davidson, 

of  Orange,  N.  J.;  Prof.  L.  P.  Soldan, 

of  St.  Louis;   Miss  M.  E.  Beedy, 

of    Chicago,    and    Mr.    D.    J. 

Snider,  of  Chicago. 

Monday  Evening,  December  26th Mr.  D.  J.  Snider 

Dante's  Place  in  the  World's  Literature 

Tuesday  Morning,  December  27th Dr.  W.  T.  Harris 

Dante's  Inferno 

Tuesday  Evening,  December  27th 

— Prof.  Thomas  Davidson 
The  Teachers  of  Dante 
Wednesday  Morning,  December  28th. .  .Miss  M.  E.  Beedy 
The  Symbols  of  Punishment  in  Dante's  Inferno 

Wednesday  Evening,  December  28th Dr.  W.  T.  Harris 

The  Mythology  of  Dante 

Thursday  Morning,  December  29th 

— Prof.  Thomas  Davidson 
Virgil  and  Beatrice  as  Guides 


Thursday  Evening,  December  29th 

— Prof.   Louis  P.   Soldan 


Friday  Morning,  December  30th Dr.  W.  T.  Harris 

The  Purgatorio  and  the  Paradiso 

Friday  Evening,  December  30th.  .Prof.  Thomas  Davidson 

The  Vision   of  God — Interpretation   of  the  Last   Canto 

of  Paradiso 

Saturday  Morning,  December  31st Mr.  D.  J.  Snider 

Discipline   of   the  Purgatorio 


D.  J.  Snider,  Director  of  the  School,  Palmer  House, 
Chicago,  Ills. 


532    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

Let  my  circumspect  reader  take  due  note  of 
what  is  here  announced.  All  these  people  set  down 
as  lecturers  were  in  one  way  or  other  connected 
with  the  old  St.  Louis  Movement,  which  was  thus 
celebrating  in  another  city  a  kind  of  reunion  or  in- 
deed a  re-natal  day  of  second  birth,  after  some 
twenty  years  of  changeful  destinies.  Likewise  we 
all  had  been  at  first  teachers  in  the  Public  Schools 
of  St.  Louis ;  in  fact  every  one  of  us  except  Harris 
had  belonged  to  the  High  School,  then  the  only 
one  in  the  city  with  a  dozen  to  fifteen  in  the  fac- 
ulty. Uplifting  days  were  those  for  our  Public 
School  System,  furnishing  instruction  not  only  to 
the  youth  in  charge,  but  to  the  grown  people  of 
the  community,  indeed  of  the  whole  country.  These 
teachers  pursued  with  zeal  their  regular  vocation, 
to  which  however,  they  added  their  cultural  Super- 
vocation,  and  through  this  service  they  were  con- 
secrated as  members  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement. 

Now  we  are  ready  for  the  second  fact  indicated 
in  the  above  program,  if  we  scrutinize  it  with  care ; 
none  of  these  five  St.  Louis  speakers  hailed  at  this 
time  from  St.  Louis  itself  except  Soldan,  who  had 
only  one  lecture.  Harris,  Davidson,  and  myself 
had  alighted  in  very  different  spots  after  the  St. 
Louis  upheaval ;  Miss  Beedy,  a  globe-rounder,  mak- 
ing a  long  detour  especially  through  England,  had 
returned  to  America  and  had  dropped  down  on 
Chicago,  where  one  day  I  was  surprised  to  find  her 
teaching  in  a  private  school  of  the  North  Side. 
Accordingly  I  summoned  from  the  points  of  the 


TEE  CEICAGO  LITERARY  8CE00LS.         533 

compass  my  trained  lieutenants  (so  I  may  call 
them  for  the  nonce)  to  help  me  in  this  fresh  onset 
of  our  Movement,  which  now  seemed  about  to  per- 
form the  as  yet  highest  achievement  of  its  exist- 
ence. 

But  my  difficulties  lay  not  alone  with  sodden 
Chicago  philistinism,  which  was  an  outside  obstacle 
and  one  to  be  expected.  Right  at  the  start  I  ran 
against  a  snag  on  the  inside  with  a  sudden  shock. 
I  sent  an  invitation  to  Harris  first  of  all,  as  my 
right-hand  man,  telling  him  also  that  Davidson 
was  to  be  his  fellow-lecturer.  Judge  my  astonish- 
ment when  his  answer  showed  unwillingness,  hesi- 
tation, though  not  exactly  downright  refusal.  He 
balked  at  co-operating  again  with  Davidson,  whose 
conduct  had  been  so  disloyal  during  the  Concord 
Dante  School  of  the  previous  year,  in  starting  a 
little  school  of  his  own  outside  the  regular  lecture 
course  at  his  boarding-house.  There  were  other 
complaints  against  him,  which  Harris  did  not  ex- 
pand in  detail,  but  of  which  I  knew  vaguely  by 
rumor.  Still  I  never  dreamed  the  snarl  to  be  so 
serious,  though  I  was  aware  that  it  lay  in  David- 
son's original  make-up  of  nature  to  play  such 
tricks;  he  could  not  help  starting  a  breach  against 
his  own  employers,  and  forming  his  own  coterie  of 
admirers  in  opposition. 

I  wrote  back  to  Harris  that  he  must  overcome 
himself  and  come  by  all  means;  that  a  great  op- 
portunity had  dropped  on  us  all  to  get  a  new  au- 
dience in  Chicago,  which  had  always  seemed  for 


534    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

us,  in  our  old  St.  Louis  days,  the  city  impossible; 
that  he  would  be  welcomed  by  an  eager  and  intelli- 
gent band  of  listeners  who  knew  of  him  and  his 
works,  for  I  had  not  failed  to  tell  them;  that  he 
would  be  entertained  at  the  house  of  a  fine  appre- 
ciative lady,  Mrs.  J.  N.  Crouse,  who  was  also  deeply 
interested  in  the  Kindergarten.  Moreover  with 
some  emphasis  I  told  him  that  I  was  Director  of 
the  School,  and  would  preside  at  every  session,  and 
open  every  debate;  that  I  believed  I  could  keep 
Davidson  within  limits,  inasmuch  as  he  was  some- 
what used  to  my  authority,  since  I  had  been  his 
superior  in  the  St.  Louis  High  School,  and  had 
frequently  there  set  him  to  rights.  I  was  aware 
that  he  did  not  like  me  very  well,  chiefly  on  account 
of  these  old  memories;  still  I  felt  assured  that  he 
would  avoid  a  collision  with  me,  who  had  invited 
him  and  given  him  along  with  a  fair  recompense  a 
new  field  for  propagating  his  ideas  about  his  fa- 
vorite book.  To  Harris  I  repeated  that  Davidson 
filled  a  place  in  my  program,  and  in  the  Dante 
work  generally,  and  also  in  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment, which  could  not  be  taken  by  any  other  per- 
son. And  may  I  breathe  here  an  autobiographic 
whisper  that  I  took  my  secret  pleasure  in  thus  giv- 
ing validity  to  a  man  not  very  congenial  to  me. 

The  happy  response  of  Harris  was  his  appear- 
ance in  person  the  day  before  the  School  opened. 
I  had  a  long  talk  with  him  about  various  subjects 
of  mutual  interest;  only  once  I  touched  upon  the 
Davidson  matter,  when  he  still  showed  the  heat  of 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         535 

offense,  but  at  the  same  time  shut  it  off  with  his 
strong  self-suppression.  Nothing  further  was  said 
on  that  sensitive  point.  I  felt  in  his  talk  that  he 
deemed  the  Concord  School  to  have  done  its  work 
and  delivered  its  message,  and  that  he  was  glad  to 
greet  and  to  help  its  successor  in  the  West. 

A  word  about  pay.  I  was  determined  not  to  be- 
gin till  the  School  could  give  a  reasonable  recom- 
pense to  its  lecturers.  Harris  and  Davidson  com- 
ing from  a  distance,  received  each  one-hundred  and 
fifty  dollars  with  free  entertainment  for  their  serv- 
ices, and  the  other  speakers  in  proportion.  Cer- 
tainly not  a  large  sum  for  such  a  grade  of  brain- 
work;  still  it  was  fair,  and  both  expressed  them- 
selves as  amply  repaid.  And  I  think  they  were. 
They  both  gave  generously  of  their  time  and  men- 
tality ;  they  had  to  earn  a  good  share  of  their  liveli- 
hood, yet  they  also  imparted  their  best  without 
price.  I  believe  they  would  have  come  for  noth- 
ing, if  I  had  asked  them ;  for  both  had  along  with 
their  moneyed  vocation  a  moneyless  Super-vocation 
quite  beyond  all  finance.  But  such  alms  from  them 
we  could  not  afford  to  take — not  I,  not  the  School, 
not  Chicago.  On  this  point  likewise  we  were  de- 
termined to  surpass  Concord.  Thus  we  preserved 
our  economic  freedom,  which  also  gave  to  me  as 
Director  an  added  right  of  authority,  which  I  felt 
to  be  needed. 

Finally  the  anxious  moment  arrived  for  the 
opening  of  the  School.  Of  course  my  faithful  sol- 
diery lined  up  on  hand  and  took  general  charge; 


536    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

the  seats  of  the  limited  hall  were  soon  all  taken, 
and  the  crowd  began  to  overflow  at  the  door.  Peo- 
ple came  whom  none  of  us  knew;  several  intro- 
duced themselves  who  lived  at  a  distance  out  of 
town.  The  auspicious  start  kept  on  repeating  us 
good  luck  from  day  to  day.  The  previous  program 
of  lecturers  with  their  subjects  will  give  some  no- 
tion of  the  sweep  of  the  course. 

Both  Harris  and  Davidson  came  fully  prepared, 
and  were  at  their  best.  They  carried  the  audience 
along  with  themselves,  and  even  more,  I  hold,  the 
audience  carried  them  along  with  itself  through  its 
appreciation  and  enthusiasm  and  unity  of  spirit. 
The  discussions  were  fully  as  instructive  as  the  lec- 
tures and  perhaps  more  animated,  for  all  three 
of  us  (Harris,  Davidson  and  myself)  took  occasion 
to  speak  our  minds  upon  one  another's  productions 
with  due  recognition,  but  with  unhesitating  frank- 
ness. Yet  everything  was  said  and  done  in  the  hap- 
piest humor.  No  one  man  took  possession  of  the 
School,  as  I  had  seen  Harris  do  at  Concord  and 
also  at  Milwaukee,  and  rightly  too,  for  he  was  the 
best.  But  now  the  School  as  a  whole  was  sovereign 
enough  over  all  its  parts  to  dominate  its  strongest 
men,  while  giving  to  each  his  due  of  worth.  The 
School  felt  itself  to  be  the  master  of  itself,  and 
every  individual  present  had  the  same  feeling. 
The  lectures  which  Harris  then  gave  are  essentially 
what  may  be  still  found  in  his  book,  The  Spiritual 
Sense  of  Dante's  Divine  Comedy.  This  was  doubt- 
less  the  most   enduring   literary  product   of   the 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         537 

School,  as  it  remains  in  to-day's  book-market,  hav- 
ing passed  through  several  editions.  Davidson  has 
left  no  such  printed  work ;  his  fatality  was  that  he 
never  gathered  up  and  organized  his  much-scat- 
tered Dante  writings.     Well,  could  he? 

But  undoubtedly  the  weakest  lecture  of  the 
School  was  that  of  our  St.  Louisan,  Soldan,  not  then 
Superintendent  of  Schools,  but  Principal  of  the 
City  Normal.  I  had  invited  him  because  I  wished 
St.  Louis  to  have  at  least  one  local  representative 
on  our  program,  for  sake  of  contrast  if  nothing 
else.  And  I  knew  that  Soldan  had  in  former  years 
given  some  study  to  Dante ;  in  the  olden  time  of  the 
St.  Louis  Movement  I  had  heard  him  read  a  brief 
paper  on  the  Divine  Comedy  to  a  little  group  of 
us,  one  of  whom  was  Davidson,  who  then  and  there 
made  fun  of  it,  since  he  had  not  yet  experienced 
his  grand  conversion  to  and  through  Dante.  Sol- 
dan arrived  in  the  morning  of  the  day  on  whose 
evening  he  was  to  lecture ;  he  came  over  to  the  Hall 
to  see  what  was  going  on,  and  panicky  became  his 
surprise  when  he  caught  sight  of  that  audience.  I 
met  him  at  the  door,  and  greeted  him,  inviting  him 
to  take  his  seat  on  the  platform  with  the  other  lec- 
turers. His  ruddy  complexion  took  a  flaming 
glow,  his  quick  breath  jerked  quicker,  and  his 
gray-blue  eyes  scintillated  and  bulged  from  their 
sockets,  as  he  exclaimed:  "Well,  I  never  expected 
this!"  He  listened  to  the  lecture  which  was  by 
Davidson ;  very  uneasy  and  excited  I  noticed  him 
twitching  about,  as  he  looked  into  that  mass  of  up- 


538  THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

turned  and  discriminating  faces,  and  caught  their 
response  and  felt  the  surge-like  uplift  of  their 
spirit.  As  soon  as  he  could  he  slipped  away  with- 
out hearing  the  discussion,  and  declined  to  be  the 
guest  of  one  of  our  entertainers.  He  must  have 
pushed  straightway  for  his  hotel  and  have  gone 
to  work  with  a  kind  of  desperation.  For  he  had 
come  without  his  manuscript  and  without  much 
preparation ;  now  he  was  to  stand  before  that  large 
critical  audience  in  competition  with  those  emin- 
ent rivals  of  his,  Harris  and  Davidson,  both  well- 
shotted  to  the  very  muzzle,  and  wrought  up  to 
their  highest  by  the  School's  spirit.  In  the  even- 
ing he  read  the  hurried  disjointed  jottings  which 
he  had  evidently  scribbled  down  at  the  hotel,  and 
added  comments  extempore  to  fill  out  the  hour 
allotted.  Soldan  came  to  this  country  from  Ger- 
many a  young  but  grown  man;  he  spoke  English 
with  a  perceptible  accent  at  his  best;  on  the  whole 
he  wrote  our  language  correctly,  if  not  very  idio- 
matically. But  now  he  was  upset  and  flustered, 
his  foreign  gutturals  became  more  uncontrollable, 
and  he  stammered  and  spoke  thick,  hesitating  for 
the  right  word;  then  his  Germanisms  in  his  Eng- 
lish increased  almost  laughably  with  his  excite- 
ment, for  naturally  his  mother-tongue  rose  first  to 
mind  in  his  emergency.  He  had  asked  me  in  his 
reply  to  my  letter  of  invitation  to  wait  for  the 
title  of  his  subject,  but  he  never  sent  it,  and  so  the 
program  had  to  leave  his  theme  a  blank.  He  could 
not  quite  push  through  to  the  close  of  his  hour,  but 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         539 

gave  up  after  some  forty-five  minutes  or  so,  when 
we  all  sprang  to  the  discussion  with  a  zest  which  I 
hope  relieved  the  speaker's  embarrassment.  The 
fact  is  Soldan  imagined  the  School  to  be  like  one 
of  our  little  St.  Louis  knots  of  philosophic  duffers, 
before  whom  he  could  at  ease  indulge  in  a  desultory 
zigzag  chat — a  bad  mistake  on  his  part.  I  pitied 
him,  for  he  was  ambitious,  if  not  a  little  jealous 
of  his  two  successful  competitors.  I  resolved  to 
give  him  another  chance  that  he  might  redeem 
himself,  for  he  had  the  ability.  The  next  year  at 
Chicago  we  were  to  have  Goethe ;  I  intended  to  as- 
sign him  a  place  on  the  program,  with  a  gentle 
hint  that  he  must  not  let  himself  get  caught  again. 
Something  interfered  with  his  coming,  I  do  not 
now  remember  what.  But  in  the  later  Literary 
Schools  at  St.  Louis,  I  took  pleasure  in  offering 
him  a  part  which  he  performed  with  distinction, 
evidencing  both  thought  and  careful  preparation. 
So  he  showed  the  strength  to  retrieve  himself  com- 
pletely. 

The  newspapers  reported  us  fairly,  with  some 
lapses  as  might  be  expected  on  such  a  subject. 
Harris  was  the  wise  man  here  again,  and  looked 
after  his  own  report,  making  an  abstract  of  his 
lecture  beforehand,  and  giving  copies  of  it  to  the 
reporters.  The  result  was  the  press  even  in  the 
East  took  note  of  the  marvelous  fact  that  Chicago 
had  held  a  large  and  successful  Dante  School.  The 
tone  on  the  whole  was  that  of  surprise  and  of 
satirical  raillery.     But  the  New  York  Sun  had  an 


540   THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

editorial  on  Chicago  as  the  reformed  gambler,  hav- 
ing been  converted  from  maddest  stock  speculation 
to  the  penitential  journey  through  the  Inferno,  thus 
viewing  a  panorama  of  all  its  sins.  Somehow  thus, 
as  I  remember,  ran  the  tirade,  touched  up  with 
contemptuous  flings  at  the  very  idea  of  a  Literary 
School  in  such  a  literal  hog-pen  as  Chicago.  At 
once  our  local  newspapers  took  up  the  challenge 
and  tusked  back  with  even  greater  swinishness, 
while  defending  their  city  as  the  very  home  of  the 
higher  culture  of  which  the  Dante  School  was  only 
a  slight  manifestation.  Thus  our  venture  won 
fame  all  over  the  country,  and  obtained  in  our  own 
city  a  very  warm  laudatory  defense  which  we 
could  never  get  before.  In  this  way  Dame  Chi- 
cago showed  her  civic  trait  of  upholding  her  own 
against  outside  attack,  though  otherwise  ready  to 
tear  the  same  to  pieces.  Somebody  has  said  that 
Dame  St.  Louis  is  endowed  with  the  opposite  ten- 
dency: she  will  help  the  foreign  assailant  calum- 
nate  and  harass  her  Great  Man  till  the  latter  takes 
to  flight.  The  number  of  her  famous  people  whom 
she  has  persuaded  to  quit  her  has  been  sometimes 
regarded  as  her  most  successful  achievement. 

The  current  of  the  School  ran  strong  but  har- 
monious, both  our  protagonists  doing  their 
worthiest  and  keeping  the  peace  with  each  other — 
for  me  a  somewhat  ticklish  point,  in  view  of  their 
past  history.  At  last,  however,  during  the  eighth 
lecture  a  little  clash  began  to  start  over  the  meaning 
of  a  philosophic  term  in  Aristotle — an  echo  of  one 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.        541 

of  their  hot  Concord  disputes  about  a  word.  Both 
had  been  talking  paradisaically  upon  the  poet's 
Paradiso,  and  had  specially  emphasized  the  grand 
reconciliation  in  Heaven  between  the  two  famous 
saintly  Doctors  of  the  Church,  St.  Thomas  and  St. 
Bonaventura,  canonized  as  the  Doctor  Angelicus 
and  the  Doctor  Seraphicus  respectively.  But  with 
a  breath  suddenly  the  waters  began  to  get  roiled. 
I  could  see  Harris  turning  a  little  whiter  in  the 
lip  at  some  challenging  passionate  assertion  of  red- 
faced  Davidson,  now  getting  redder,  when  I,  as 
presiding  officer,  rose  in  the  minute's  lull  and  be- 
gan to  fantasy:  "This  is  the  auspicious  moment, 
and  I  propose  that  we  re-enact  the  upper  celestial 
harmony  here  below,  and  that  we  now  turn  our 
School  into  a  kind  of  Paradiso  by  celebrating  a 
grand  reconciliation  between  our  St.  Thomas  (here 
I  pointed  at  Davidson)  and  our  St.  Bonaventura 
(here  I  pointed  at  Harris)  ;  and  I  further  propose 
that  our  Angelic  Doctor  and  our  Seraphic  Doctor 
become  followers  of  their  great  prototypes  in 
Heaven  above,  and  sing  each  other's  praises  now  in 
our  little  earthly  Paradise  down  here  in  Chicago." 
The  audience  tittered  a  brief  ripple,  when  David- 
son jumped  up  exclaiming,  "Well  turned;  still  I 
am  not  worthy  of  being  called  St.  Thomas  in  spite 
of  my  name,  but  our  Doctor  Harris  is  just  St.  Bona- 
ventura, the  Seraphic  Doctor." 

At  this  happy  conclusion  I  dismissed  the  meeting, 
for  the  time  was  up ;  in  the  nick  I  made  the  an- 
nouncement that  this  evening  St.  Thomas,  our  own 


542   THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

new  Angelic  Doctor,  would  interpret  for  us  that 
most  wonderful  chapter  of  angelology,  "the  Vision 
of  God,"  in  the  last  Canto  of  the  Paradiso  (see 
program).  The  lecture  was  given,  when  Harris 
rose  and  expressed  the  most  unstinted  absolute 
praise  for  the  performance  I  ever  heard  him  utter. 
Davidson  replied  in  a  similar  vein  of  personal  ad- 
miration. We  were  all  struck  by  the  strange,  quite 
prophetic  re-enactment  and  fulfilment  of  that  old 
saintly  reconciliation,  and  went  home  wondering 
in  a  half-startled  spell.  I  believe  that  both  after- 
wards remained  friends  to  life's  close,  with  some 
little  tilts  thrown  in  by  the  way  to  diversify  old 
Time's  noiselessly  monotonous  footfalls. 

The  last  lecture,  which  happened  to  be  one  of 
mine,  and  the  last  discussion  were  over,  and  the 
School  felt  itself  somehow  to  have  just  begun.  "It 
cannot  stop,  we  must  have  another,"  was  the  gen- 
eral cry  which  focused  into  the  ear  of  the  Director. 
A  larger  hall  was  also  demanded.  The  little  army, 
conscious  of  its  discipline,  and  having  won  its  first 
victory,  declared  itself  not  only  willing  but  eager 
for  another  campaign.  The  money  and  the  effort 
were  pledged,  and  the  spirit  was  at  high  tide.  Ac- 
cordingly I  adjourned  the  audience  with  the  words : 
"Next  season  we  shall  have  a  Goethe  School.  But 
remember,  we  must  prepare  for  it  better  than  ever 
during  the  intervening  year.  A  Literary  Bible  has 
to  be  studied,  taken  to  heart  and  mind,  not  merely 
perused  like  the  newspaper;  indeed  it  should  be 
lived,  if  we  wish  to  assimilate  its  true  meaning  and 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         543 

worth.  And  now  I  shall  give  a  parting  compliment 
to  our  distinguished  lecturers,  Dr.  Harris  and  Prof. 
Davidson,  propounding  to  them  this  question : 
"Will  you  come  to  us  again  next  year?  Tell  us 
on  the  spot."  Both  spoke  up  a  hearty  Yes,  Yes, 
and  the  first  Dante  School  became  a  memory. 

II.  The  Goethe  School.  I  foreboded  the  hazard 
of  the  enterprise,  for  I  had  already  harvested  a 
goodly  crop  of  experience  through  conducting 
study-classes  in  the  German  poet.  The  deep-rooted 
prejudice  against  him  on  the  part  of  many  culti- 
vated people  was  well  known  to  me  personally  as 
well  as  by  much  printed  damnation.  Of  the  four 
Literary  Bibles  that  of  Goethe  was  the  most  diffi- 
cult in  form,  and  the  most  questionable  on  account 
of  its  content.  Then  it  was  the  most  recent  of  them 
all ;  Goethe  himself  had  been  dead  only  a  little  more 
than  fifty  years  when  our  Literary  School  opened. 
Had  there  been  time  enough  for  his  Last  Judg- 
ment ?  Accordingly  the  problem  was  not  yet  fully 
settled  whether  the  High  Literary  Tribunal  of  the 
Ages  had  conferred  final  canonization  upon  his 
book  as  a  Literary  Bible.  But  I  believed  in  him, 
and  our  St.  Louis  Movement  headed  by  Brockmeyer 
had  distinctively  acclaimed  Goethe's  poetical  su- 
premacy. To  be  sure,  in  his  cause  the  labor  became 
a  kind  of  new  apostolate,  for  Homer,  Dante,  and 
Shakespeare  were  all  accepted  in  the  traditional 
canon,  but  the  battle  for  Goethe  had  not  yet  been 
completely  won,  especially  in  our  Anglo-Saxondom, 
despite  all  the  hot  preachments  of  Thomas  Carlyle, 


544    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

who,  by  the  way,  never  tackled — I  doubt  if  he  ever 
fully  knew — Goethe's  greatest  book,  Faust,  as  a 
whole  with  its  two  Parts.  In  fact,  the  Second  Part 
of  Faust  was  not  published  (excepting  the  Helena 
episode)  till  the  German  literary  Epoch  of  Carlyle 
was  on  the  decided  decline  into  a  very  different 
stage  of  his  life 's  evolution. 

So  it  came  about  that  the  Goethe  School  fur- 
nished to  me  the  peculiar  fascination  of  helping  to 
establish,  or,  if  you  will,  to  canonize  the  very  last 
Literary  Bible  of  the  centuries  far  out  on  the  Chi- 
cago frontier  of  civilization.  I  would  hardly  have 
dared  the  trial,  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  all- 
conquering  energy  generated  by  the  Dante  School, 
somewhat  in  the  community  but  specially  in  my 
valiant  little  army.  So  I  felt  the  courage  to  give  to 
these  soldiers  their  hardest  task,  though  I  was  well 
aware  that  some  of  our  best  ladies,  who  were  also 
our  most  active  campaigners  and  purse-holders,  did 
not  like  Goethe,  questioned  his  life's  worth,  felt 
shocked  at  his  multitudinous  love-affairs,  particu- 
larly at  his  treatment  of  Frederika,  and  at  his  rela- 
tion to  Christiane.  Not  a  few  had  read  the  life  of 
Goethe  by  Lewes,  then  a  common  but  damnable 
book,  in  which  lurks  the  author's  bent  to  impress 
the  reader  how  much  greater  Lewes  is  than  Goethe, 
and  that  by  right  Goethe  the  lesser  ought  to  be  the 
biographer  of  Lewes  the  Hero. 

Still  there  can  be  no  denying  that  Goethe  ha* 
the  gift  of  begetting  an  unconquerable  repugnance 
in  certain  female  natures.     I  have  had  ladies  quit 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.        545 

my  Faust  class  in  a  kind  of  horror,  declaring  that 
they  did  not  wish  to  come  into  such  close  touch  with 
the  very  Devil — perchance  with  their  special  Devil, 
Goethe's  Mephistopheles,  who  even  in  dead  type  was 
altogether  too  living  for  them,  too  real  and,  indeed, 
too  overpowering.  They  could  not  stand  him,  or 
perchance  withstand  him,  so  that  their  only  hope 
was  in  running  away  from  his  inky  presence,  though 
limned  only  in  printer's  lampblack.  That  awful 
Negative,  deepest  world-theme  of  Faust,  and  more 
real  just  now  than  ever,  was  not  even  to  be  looked 
upon  when  incorporate,  else  like  antique  serpent- 
haired  Medusa  it  would  turn  us  all  to  stone.  My 
view  was  that  this  our  own  Fiend  must  be  grappled 
with,  for  here  he  is,  the  most  modern  creation  in 
our  most  modern  Chicago ;  I  held  that  I  could  often 
read  the  latest  words  of  Mephistopheles  in  to-day's 
Chicago  newspaper.  Better  get  acquainted  with 
your  own  cacodemon  through  Goethe's  transfigured 
poetry,  which  bears  in  itself,  if  rightly  understood 
and  assimilated,  a  kind  of  vicarious  redemption 
from  the  wiles  of  old  Splay-foot.  Such  is  the  true 
function  of  all  Great  Literature — mediatorial,  re- 
demptive, yea  vicarious. 

Chicago  had  the  New-England  conscience,  insofar 
as  it  had  any  at  all — and  there  were  many  conscien- 
tious people  in  that  rather  conscienceless  commu- 
nity. Now,  I  had  not  only  read  in  books  but  had 
seen  at  Concord  how  the  New-England  mind  can- 
not exactly  stomach  Goethe  even  when  desperately 
trying  to  swallow  him.     The  reader  may  remember 


546    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

we  had  held  a  Goethe  School  already  at  Concord, 
not  quite  four  years  before  our  present  one.     The 
recently  published  diary   of   Emerson  shows   the 
typical  and  the  greatest  New-Englander  trying  his 
best  to  overcome  his  disgust  at  Goethe,  and  recur- 
ring to  the  attack  again  and  again,  incited  thereto 
by  the  repeated  praises  of  his  friend  Carlyle;  all 
to  no  final  victory,  it  would  seem.     Emerson  felt 
and  rightly  felt  that  there  was  something  in  Goethe 
which  he  had  never  quite  gotten,  even  though  he 
had  placed  the  German  poet  among  his  Representa- 
tive Men — again  following  probably  Carlyle 's  opin- 
ion more  than  his  own.     Now  the  strange,  riddle- 
some  fact  turns  uppermost  that  the  deepest,  most 
sympathetic   appreciation   of   Goethe   in   all  New- 
England,  as  far  as  I  can  find  the  record,  was  that 
of  a  woman,  Margaret  Fuller,  who  herein  consider- 
ably outreached  her  eminent  friend  and  sponsor, 
Emerson.     It  still  remains  something  of  a  psycho- 
logical problem  how  this  New-England  woman,  in 
all  the  grandeur  of  her  supreme  defiance  of  furious 
Puritanic  tradition,  could  stand  forth  the  single 
challenger  of  her  own  past  training,  indeed  of  the 
whole  New-England  consciousness.     At  least  only 
one  other  case  of  this  kind,  that  is,  of  this  woman- 
kind, is  known  to  me  a  little. 

Such,  then,  was  the  prime  spiritual  obstacle 
which  the  Goethe  School  had  to  meet  in  its  own  set 
as  well  as  in  its  communal  environment,  and  had 
to  transform  this  alien  spirit  into  something  like  a 
new  world-view  in  accord  with  the  last  supreme 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         547 

world-poem.  The  trial  had  to  be  made,  if  my  work 
was  ever  to  get  complete,  for  to  my  mind  the  grand 
literary  biblical  procession  of  all  civilized  time  up 
to  date  would  be  maimed  and  would  remain  quite 
unfinished  without  its  grand  final  rounding-up  in 
Goethe. 

But  woe  is  me  again  and  still  more !  "With  these 
inner  hindrances  were  now  conjoined  two  external 
counterstrokes  of  pure  ill-fortune  coming  from  our 
two  protagonists,  Harris  and  Davidson,  each  of 
whom  delivered  us  a  slap  in  the  face,  not  consciously 
intended  I  think,  but  very  real  in  its  sting,  and 
calling  our  little  army  to  start  a  new  desperate  pull 
that  we  overcome  the  damage.  Of  this  fact  also  let 
there  be  a  brief  account. 

Harris  had  done  so  well  in  the  Dante  School  that 
a  very  natural  desire  arose  in  our  public  to  hear 
him  again,  and  to  commune  with  his  charming  per- 
sonality. The  result  was  he  allowed  himself  to  be 
advertised  for  a  course  of  lectures  on  the  Philosophy 
of  History.  As  soon  as  I  heard  of  it,  for  I  was  out 
of  town  when  the  arrangement  was  made,  I  thought 
to  myself :  ' '  There !  Harris  is  again  going  to  dare 
his  stars !  He  will  once  more  embroil  himself  in 
that  Hegel's  Philosophy  of  History,  especially  in 
the  mazy  Oriental  portion  of  it,  as  I  have  seen  him 
do  a  dozen  times  without  ever  being  able  to  dis- 
entangle himself  or  his  hearers  from  that  Egyptian 
Labyrinth."  The  result  was  Harris  whizzed  rap- 
idly in  the  turn  of  a  few  months  from  loftiest 
success  down  to  dismalest  failure.     Such  was  his 


548    THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

fatality.  I  had  watched  him  make  the  same  rockety 
rise  and  fall  more  than  once  in  St.  Louis ;  he  could 
be  the  unequalest  of  men.  In  the  present  case  he 
was  practically  unprepared,  holding  in  his  hand 
only  an  incongruous  mass  of  disparate  fluttering 
papers  of  all  sizes,  from  mere  scraps  to  large  folio 
sheets,  in  which  he  would  fumble  and  then  read  and 
ramble  about,  quite  as  if  he  were  talking  to  himself 
instead  of  an  audience  of  hundreds.  Indeed,  that 
was  just  what  he  was  doing :  brooding  over  his  sub- 
ject and  some  random  jottings  scribbled  upon  it — 
the  first  rudimentary  stage  of  composition,  not  the 
third  and  completed  one,  such  as  he  gave  us  in  his 
Dante  work.  So  I  heard,  for  I  could  not  be  pres- 
ent, his  procedure  described  by  half  a  dozen  wit- 
nesses not  unfriendly  to  the  man  or  his  thought. 
Naturally,  his  failure,  for  such  it  must  be  declared, 
reacted  on  himself  and  also  on  our  coming  School. 
In  fact,  I  doubt  if  Harris  ever  regained  among  us 
that  first  prestige  of  his  won  at  our  Dante  School. 
Moreover,  I  never  thought  Harris  showed  much 
historical  bent  of  mind,  such  as  he  had  for  Philos- 
ophy, Pedagogics,  Literature ;  he  held  no  deep  inner 
communion  with  the  Spirit  of  History,  as  he  did 
with  the  Spirit  of  the  Divine  Comedy. 

Davidson  also  delivered  his  counterstroke  after 
the  peculiar  Davidsonian  manner.  He,  too,  had 
acquired  deserved  distinction  from  his  lectures  and 
discussions  at  our  Dante  School.  Accordingly  we 
sought  eagerly  to  engage  him  for  our  coming  Goethe 
session.    Davidson  had  his  attraction  for  everybody, 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         549 

I  think,  for  me  I  know,  and  also  his  repulsion. 
Moreover,  he  possessed  the  weird  Scotch  charm 
which  works  a  singular  fascination  upon  a  certain 
class  of  minds;  especially  he  flung  his  spell  over 
youths  and  women  of  congenial  temperament.  This 
unique  power  became  one  of  his  banes  as  a  teacher, 
leading  him  to  a  distinct  favoritism  in  the  school- 
room toward  his  own  like,  with  unhappy  conse- 
quences both  for  order  and  study.  These  special 
devotees  of  his  he  would  sooner  or  later  get  together 
to  start  them  on  a  line  of  his  own,  usually  in  some 
sort  of  opposition.  For  as  soon  as  he  found  him- 
self working  in  any  established  order  or  institution, 
he  would  feel  himself  ill  at  ease  and  begin  to  plan 
revolt.  To  me  Davidson  always  seemed  to  have  the 
Celtic  temperament,  as  regards  his  abilities  as  well 
as  his  shortcomings,  both  very  considerable ;  at  bot- 
tom he  was  a  Scotch  Celt,  in  spite  of  his  asserted 
old-Norse  kinship,  which  I  have  heard  him  proudly 
read  into  himself  and  also  into  his  name.  Similar 
I  construe  to  be  the  case  of  another  distinguished 
Scotchman  (rather  than  Scotsman),  Thomas  Car- 
lyle,  who  was  Celtic  both  in  his  power  and  in  his 
weakness,  though  he  shunned  and  hated  the  Celt, 
and  acclaimed  the  old  Scandinavian  gods  for  his 
heroes  in  a  sort  of  feigned  ancestral  worship. 

Imagine  our  surprise  when  we  read  one  morning 
in  the  newspapers  that  Mr.  Thomas  Davidson  had 
been  engaged  to  deliver  a  course  of  lectures  in  Chi- 
cago chiefly  on  Literature  (as  far  as  I  now  recol- 
lect) ,  only  a  few  weeks  before  the  date  of  our  Goethe 


550    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

School.  Moreover,  it  was  advertised  that  he  in- 
tended to  make  a  start  in  founding  a  great  Catholic 
University  here  in  Chicago — a  unique  but  truly 
Davidsonian  appendix  to  a  lecture-course.  So, 
without  my  knowledge  and  escaping  the  close  scru- 
tiny of  any  of  my  band  of  workers,  Davidson  had 
gotten  together  his  little  coterie  of  lady  admirers 
during  our  Dante  School  and  formed  his  new  inde- 
pendent scheme  of  opposition  which  apparently  was 
to  side-track  our  work  and  to  carry  off  into  his  own 
camp  our  supporters.  His  chief  sponsor  seems  to 
have  been  a  Catholic  lady,  who  was  connected  with 
the  city's  Press  and  who  therefore  was  able  to  give 
a  wide  publicity  to  the  new  enterprise.  Later  the 
report  flew  about  that  Davidson  had  been  taken  up 
and  specially  entertained  during  our  Dante  School 
with  dinners  and  receptions,  of  which  the  rest  of  us 
knew  nothing,  by  a  disgruntled  clique  of  important 
women  who  deemed  themselves  neglected  in  the 
administration  of  the  Literary  Schools.  I  had  no 
knowledge  of  this  matter,  which  was  anyhow  of 
rather  small  significance.  But  that  which  did  chal- 
lenge my  best  guidance,  and  with  which  I  did  have 
to  deal  in  person,  was  the  hot  excitement  and  the 
extreme  resentment  among  my  own  people,  who 
proposed  immediate  vengeance  upon  what  they 
deemed  an  act  of  treachery  right  in  the  heat  of 
battle.  At  least  he  was  to  be  dismissed  in  a  kind 
of  disgrace  from  our  program,  which  had  been 
already  published  and  scattered  broadcast. 
At  an  indignation  meeting  of  our  leading  work- 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         551 

ers  I  appeared  and  advised  them  about  as  follows : 
"You  have  just  cause  for  your  wrath,  but  do  not  let 
it  turn  you  to  instruments  of  your  own  undoing. 
There  must  be  no  split  in  our  ranks  before  the 
public.  I  wish  you  all  to  attend  in  a  body  Mr. 
Davidson 's  first  lecture,  paying  your  money ;  I  shall 
be  there  to  see  you.  It  is  on  Savonarola — a  good 
lecture  on  a  good  subject,  and  well  worth  your 
hearing.  You  need  not  go  a  second  time  unless 
you  desire.  We  cannot  put  him  off  the  program; 
there  is  nobody  to  take  his  place.  As  to  his  Catho- 
lic University,  it  seems  to  me  a  joke,  since  Davidson 
is  not  a  Catholic ;  anyhow  the  watchful  Irish  priest- 
hood of  the  city,  from  the  top  of  their  hierarchy 
down  to  its  bottom,  will  dutifully  look  after  that 
scheme.  Then  you  must  learn  to  take  Davidson  as 
he  is,  and  utilize  his  good,  which  is  not  small.  He 
has  played  such  pranks  as  this  before,  I  doubt  if 
he  can  help  it.  He  did  the  same  at  Concord  to  a 
degree  that  once  estranged  Harris.  It  will  bless 
the  cause  and  yourselves  also  to  perform  such  an 
act  of  self-denial.  So  go  to  his  lecture  once  at  least, 
and  greet  him  too  in  person." 

When  I  went  to  the  hall  I  found  my  soldierly 
band  seated  pacifically  but  solidly  together  in  a 
group  along  with  some  friends  whom  they  had  per- 
suaded to  attend.  As  soon  as  the  lecture  was  over 
I  went  up  and  saluted  Mr.  Davidson,  who  turned 
on  me  his  peculiar  strabismic  cock-eye  with  a  sort 
of  quizzing  leer,  I  thought.  We  had  furnished  him 
a  large  part  of  his  audience  that  one  time ;  rumor 


552    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

says  the  rest  of  his  course  was  very  thinly  attended. 
At  any  rate,  he  never  tried  his  scheme  again  in 
Chicago. 

Thus  I  kept  up  during  the  whole  year,  which  em- 
braced all  the  time  between  the  two  Schools,  the 
Goethe  battle,  with  varying  results.     Classes  spe- 
cially studying  Faust,   Wilhelm  Meister,  Elective 
Affinities,  I  held  in  various  localities  of  the  city 
and  suburbs.     Then  lecture  courses  on  Goethe  for 
a  more  general  audience  I  undertook,  animated  and 
loyally  supported  by  my  cohort  of  Kindergarten 
soldiery.     A  program  lying  before  me  shows  the 
scope  of  these  courses,  announcing  in  its  head-lines : 
"Ten  Lectures  on  Goethe  will  be  given  in  the  Lec- 
ture Hall  of  the  Art  Institute,  beginning  Saturday, 
October  13th,  1888,  and  continuing  one  a  week  for 
ten  weeks."     The  list  of  subjects  shows  the  attempt 
to  get  a  view  of  the  entire  Goethe,  and  has  in  my 
own  development  a  certain  biographic  value,  for  I 
had  already  meditated  much  upon  his  total  human 
achievement.     So  I  insert  it : 

PROGRAMME. 

Oct.  13th.  Goethe's  Biography.— The  Poet's  Life  as  a 
Poem. 

Oct.  20th.  The  Youth  of  Goethe.— The  Poet  as  Titan, 
"Prometheus,"  "Faust,"  "Mahomet,"  "Wer- 
ther." 

Oct.  27th.  Goethe  as  Lyrical  Poet. — The  Song  Writer 
and  Balladist. 

Nov.  3rd.  Goethe  as  Scientist. — Botany.  "The  Meta- 
morphosis of  Plants." 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         553 

Nov.  10th.  Goethe  as  Scientist.— To  what  extent  the  pre- 
cursor of  Darwin.  Osteology.  Theory  of 
Color. 

Nov.  17th.  Goethe  in  Italy.— The  Classical  Renascence. 
Epigrams,  Xenia,  Elegies,  Epics. 

Nov.  24th.  Goethe  as  Classical  Dramatist. — "Iphigenia," 
"Tasso." 

Dec.  1st.  Goethe  as  Novelist. — "Elective  Affinities," 
"Wilhelm  Meister." 

Dec.  8th.  Goethe  as  Writer  of  the  Fairy  Tale.— "Das 
Marchen."     "The  New  Melusina." 

Dec.  15th.     Goethe  as  Letter  Writer  and  Conversationist. 

It  may  be  seen  from  the  foregoing  program  that 
I  was  already  making  a  strong  effort  to  master 
Goethe's  life,  that  wonderfully  diversified,  subtly 
interelated,  universally  productive  life,  probably 
the  most  comprehensive  of  all  lives  ever  lived — also 
the  poet's  greatest  poetic  work.  I  can  find  no  com- 
plete manuscript  of  these  lectures,  only  some  ram- 
bling, inorganic  notes.  And  I  may  here  add  that 
it  took  more  than  a  quarter  of  a  century  longer 
before  I  could  fully  mature  and  write  out  my  com- 
plete biographic  conception  of  the  poet,  and  print 
the  same  under  the  title  "Goethe's  Life-Poem" 
(1915).  Thus  my  Goethe  has  kept  at  my  side 
through  a  long  line  of  years  reaching  from  youth 
to  old-age.  Sometimes  I  dream  that  I  am  not  done 
with  him  yet,  for  I  see  him  now  revealing  his 
people's  chief  spiritually  redemptive  power  from 
the  mighty  German  cataclysm  of  to-day. 

Goethe,  as  our  recent  greatest  poet,  has  incar- 
nated the  spirit 's  Denier  and  Destroyer  in  the  most 


554    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

modern  form,  but  has  also  shown  him  overmastered 
after  furious  conflict  and  made  to  serve.  But  many 
people,  and,  if  I  may  hazard  the  word  of  my  expe- 
rience, most  women  do  not  wish  to  view  this  modern 
Inferno  with  its  highly  educated  Devil,  but  prefer 
the  old,  more  sensuous,  and  externally  more  hor- 
rible Inferno  of  Dante.  They  prefer  Satan  to 
Mephistopheles,  from  whom  they  would  run  away. 
Very  well,  if  that  be  the  last  of  the  matter ;  but  the 
Devil  has  just  the  insidious  power  of  flight  over- 
head, and  can  place  himself  right  in  front  of  the 
poor,  weak  mortal  who  is  fleeing  from  his  presence. 
Thus  Dante  has  the  advantage  of  portraying  this  old 
traditional  Hell  and  Heaven — the  great  medieval 
Christian  solution  of  the  problem  of  antique 
Heathendom  and  its  Fall  of  Man.  Hence  Dante 
transmutes  the  beautiful  Classical  world  of  Greece 
into  his  Infernal  monstrosities.  But  Goethe  sets 
forth  our  latest  Hell,  and  also  our  Purgatorial  trial 
and  redemption,  in  a  very  real,  untraditional  way, 
and  hence  very  shocking.  But  is  not  that  just 
our  right  medicine?  Moreover,  Hell  and  Heaven 
are  put  under  evolution — another  uncomfortable 
thought.  And  we  feel  that  Goethe  is  his  own  In- 
ferno and  Purgatory,  yea  his  own  Mephistopheles, 
and  does  not  merely  pass  through  and  look  on  and 
then  describe,  as  does  Dante,  even  if  we  know  that 
the  latter  is  also  a  part  of  what  he  sees. 

Another  disappointment  was  the  failure  of  the 
educated  German  population  of  Chicago  to  give 
any  pronounced  help,  or  to  feel  any  active  interest 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         555 

which  would  further  the  influence  of  their  greatest 
poet,  or  rather  their  greatest  modern  man,  in  their 
new  American  home.  This  made  a  noticeable  con- 
trast with  St.  Louis,  which  always  had  its  German 
contingent,  not  very  large  perhaps,  in  the  activities 
of  the  St.  Louis  Movement. 

Finally,  in  the  face  of  all  frowns  of  Dame  For- 
tune, the  Goethe  School  opened  during  the  Holi- 
days, 1888,  at  the  Madison  Street  Theater,  whose 
auditorium  had  been  hired  to  meet,  by  its  larger 
capacity,  the  grand  overflowing  audience,  which, 
however,  did  not  come.  Still  it  did  not  seriously 
fall  away  from  that  of  the  previous  Dante  year. 
Eight  of  the  lectures  were  given  by  the  same  old 
three  of  us  (Harris,  Davidson,  and  myself),  but 
there  were  two  new  ones.  The  first  of  these  was  our 
lady  representative  on  the  program,  Mrs.  Caroline 
K.  Sherman,  of  Chicago,  the  only  woman,  I  think 
I  may  say,  I  ever  personally  knew  who  had  sympa- 
thetically taken  up,  assimilated,  and  actually  loved 
Goethe.  And  she  was  by  birth  a  New-Englander, 
and  thus  to  me  suggests  in  this  respect  Margaret 
Fuller,  and  more  remotely  Varnhagen's  Rahel. 
Very  appropriately  and  congenially  she  chose  as 
her  theme  Goethe 's  Portraits  of  Women.  Our  other 
lecturer  was  a  regular  University  Professor,  a  good 
man  but  a  misfit  for  our  work,  in  truth  a  double 
misfit — we  did  not  fit  him,  nor  he  us  who  were 
studying  Goethe  as  a  Literary  Bible,  not  so  much 
philologically,  or  textually,  or  even  historically,  all 
of  which  methods  have  their  due  place  in  the  Uni- 


556    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

versity  proper.  It  was  the  first  and  last  time  I 
made  such  a  selection  for  our  Schools,  since  Pro- 
fessor R.  G.  Moulton,  who  gave  us  excellent  and 
sympathetic  help  in  our  later  courses,  belonged  to 
the  so-called  University  Extension  Movement. 

On  the  whole,  our  Goethe  School  had  not  the 
success  of  our  Dante  School.  Somehow  outer  ill- 
luck  was  inclined  to  smite  it  vengefully;  then  it 
had  not  the  same  inner  upspring  of  the  spirit. 
Davidson  was,  in  the  main,  critical  of  Goethe,  and 
never  got  to  the  soul  of  him,  I  think.  Harris 
worked  hard  in  appreciation  of  the  poet,  whom  he 
failed  not  to  praise  and  to  philosophize  profoundly 
and  even  warmly.  But  I  cannot  help  feeling  that 
far  down  in  the  secret  substrate  of  his  being  lurked 
still  the  Puritanic  protest.  He  took  his  Goethe 
more  from  Brockmeyer  than  from  himself,  quite  as 
Emerson  adopted  the  poet  from  Carlyle.  At  any 
rate,  our  two  protagonists  showed  by  no  means  the 
same  spiritual  exaltation,  the  same  devoted  apostle- 
ship,  the  same  radiant  love  for  this  Literary  Bible 
as  they  did  for  Dante.  And  in  the  audience  our 
female  fore-fighters  embattled,  fought  bravely  and 
grimly  rather  than  whole-heartedly,  for  the  Teu- 
tonic poet;  they  obeyed,  like  good  soldiers  in  the 
tug  of  onslaught,  but  could  not  be  brought  to  charge 
with  the  old  shout  of  enthusiasm. 

Something  of  the  sort  I  had  forecast,  but  I  could 
not  help  myself.  The  only  man  I  knew  to  whom 
Goethe  was  the  one  supreme  Literary  Bible  was 
Brockmeyer,  but  I  dared  not  summon  him,  espe- 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         557 

cially  after  the  Milwaukee  experience.  There  was 
no  foretelling  what  twist  he  might  take.  As  it 
turned  out,  I  had  trouble  enough  in  guiding  my 
two  forespanned  careening  recalcitrant  steeds  har- 
nessed to  my  sun-chariot;  if  I  had  taken  a  third 
courser  and  him  Brockmeyer  most  defiant  of  all 
defiers,  and  hitched  him  in  front  of  the  team,  poor 
weak  Phaethon,  the  charioteer,  would  have  had  a 
runaway  which  would  have  tumbled  him  and  his 
Goethe  School  and  all  his  future  Literary  Schools 
into  the  deep  Icarian  sea  of  total  annihilation.  As 
it  was,  Brockmeyer  came  near  capsizing  us  all  into 
Lake  Michigan  at  the  Milwaukee  School. 

So  our  Goethe  School  at  last  came  duly  to  port 
mid  a  halcyon  spell  without  any  grand  overturn 
in  spite  of  some  ominous  moments.  I  doubt  if  I 
ever  felt  a  greater  relief  in  my  life  than  when  I 
concluded  the  last  lecture  of  the  course  and  an- 
nounced from  the  platform:  "This  School  is  now 
at  an  end,  and  we  can  all  go  home. ' ' 

But  to  my  surprise,  the  bulk  of  the  audience 
refused  to  budge,  and  from  its  center  rose  a  voice : 
"What  about  next  year?  We  haven't  had  Shakes- 
peare yet."  Then  another  voice  spoke  up:  "We 
want  Homer,  too;  let  us  make  the  entire  round  of 
the  Literary  Bibles  before  we  disband."  The  re- 
mark was  received  not  only  with  general  approval 
but  with  a  perceptible,  soldierly  will  to  push  ahead 
on  the  fighting  line  till  the  whole  fortress  be  taken. 
My  little  army  really  showed  a  tougher  fibre  than 
the  captain,  who,  however,  did  not  fail  to  seal  his 


558   THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PABT  SECOND. 

own  work  with  that  final  appeal,  exclaiming :  ' '  Let 
me  go  along — forward,  then,  to  the  next  outpost." 

III.  The  Shakespeare  and  Homer  Schools.  So 
we  had  a  Shakespeare  Year  (1889)  and  after  it  a 
Homer  year  (1890),  each  of  them  culminating  in 
its  special  Literary  School  at  which  during  one 
week  ten  lectures  were  given  with  supplementary 
discussions  by  speakers  of  distinction.  In  both 
cases  a  year's  preparation  was  made  in  study 
classes  throughout  the  city  for  the  final  event, 
which  thus  became  the  main  lever  for  working  up 
the  interest.  All  these  Literary  Schools  were  built 
after  the  same  general  model,  each  of  which,  how- 
ever had  its  particular  variation. 

Objection  had  been  made  to  the  two  previous 
Schools  that  Chicago  was  not  sufficiently  repre- 
sented on  the  program,  the  lecturers  being  chiefly 
of  the  St.  Louis  Movement.  Also  the  demand  was 
heard  that  the  course  should  be  popularized,  hav- 
ing been  hitherto  darkened  by  the  presence  of  too 
many  philosophers.  Perhaps  still  more  deeply 
lurked  the  religious  suspicions  concerning  the  very 
idea  of  a  Literary  Bible.  As  our  next  subject  was 
Shakespeare,  a  popular  poet  and  favorite  with 
many  divines  of  very  different  creeds,  I  concluded 
to  construct  a  program  to  meet  the  occasion.  Ac- 
cordingly we  (the  ladies  more  than  I)  succeeded 
in  getting  no  less  than  four  clergymen  of  Chicago 
as  lecturers  for  our  third  Literary  School,  on 
Shakespeare — one  woman  and  three  men.  To  be 
sure  I  summoned  to  my  aid  Harris  and  also  David- 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         559 

son,  but  they  with  myself  were  to  keep  somewhat 
in  the  background  this  time,  ready,  however,  to  fill 
any  gap  in  the  list  of  speakers  or  to  meet  emer- 
gencies, should  they  occur.  For  I  was  almost 
afraid  of  my  good-luck,  when  I  printed  on  my 
program  the  names  of  the  three  most  popular  and 
distinguished  preachers  of  Chicago — Drs.  Swing, 
Gunsaulus,  and  Lorimer — with  the  subjects  of  their 
lectures.  So  was  fairly  met  the  request  for  more 
of  Chicago,  more  of  popularity,  and  more  of  reli- 
gion in  our  course. 

Davidson  again  took  his  part  of  the  devil's  ad- 
cocate,  and  amused  us  all  by  his'  lampoons  against 
Shakespeare  in  general.  But  especially  he  grew 
almost  frantic  in  denunciation  of  the  poet's  master- 
piece, Hamlet,  whom  he  crowned  with  a  garland  of 
many  mal-odorous  epithets.  At  the  top  of  his  fer- 
vor he  steadied  his  glance  on  me,  who  was  presiding 
as  director  of  the  School,  when  he  proclaimed  that 
he  was  going  to  throw  a  bomb  into  this  whole 
Shakespeare  propaganda,  which  according  to  his 
word  had  turned  to  rancid  idolatry.  When  he 
had  taken  his  seat,  I  rose  and  laughingly  replied, 
as  Davidson's  menace  was  never  serious:  "I  hope 
our  friend's  missile  will  do  us  no  harm  for  his  own 
sake;  he  must  have  heard  with  all  the  rest  of  the 
world  what  Chicago  does  to  its  bomb-throwers." 
Whereat  a  little  burst  of  applause  ran  round  the 
room,  which  I  tried  to  suppress  by  a  wave  of  the 
hand;  for  the  soul  of  Chicago  would  still  start  to 
thrill  at  the  memory  of  the  deed,  trial,  and  execu- 


560    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

tion  of  the  anarchists  then  some  two  years  past  in 
its  final  act.  And  everybody  thought  of  them 
when  even  the  word  bomb  was  mentioned.  "Meet- 
ing now  adjourned"  I  cried,  "but  let  us  all  go  up 
and  shake  hands  with  that  jolly  good-fellow,  Tom 
Davidson."  And  I  started  from  the  platform  to  be  , 
the  first  one  to  greet  him. 

Thus  the  old  set  of  us  stood  back  and  listened  to 
what  the  new  speakers,  five  of  them  all  told,  would 
say  to  us  about  Shakespeare  in  lecture  and  in  dis- 
cussion. My  single  contribution  on  the  program 
was  a  poem  in  blank  verse  called  Shakespeare  at 
Stratford,  which  sought  to  construe  what  the  poet 
did  with  himself  after  retiring  from  London  to 
Stratford  during  the  .last  four  or  five  years  of  his 
life.  That  poem  was  written  thirty  years  ago,  and 
I  must  have  read  a  dozen  poetic  performances  on 
the  same  subject  in  the  last  decade,  which  show  a 
wide  divergence  of  conception,  making  Shakes- 
peare on  the  one  hand  a  pessimist,  sensualist,  gen- 
eral debauchee  in  his  life's  close,  or  placing  him,  on 
the  other  hand  at  the  opposite  extreme  as  an 
humble  penitent  for  his  past  sins,  even  to  the  ex- 
tent of  being  received  secretly  into  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church  by  an  itinerant  Jesuit  priest. 
None  of  these  presentments  show  me  my  Shakes- 
peare, whose  spirit  has  the  power  of  evolving  with 
the  years.  (The  poem  is  printed  in  the  Appendix 
to  the  Writer  of  Books.) 

Our  Homer  year   (1890)    was  chiefly  spent  in 
studying  the  Iliad  and  the  Odyssey,  not  only  in 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         561 

beautiful  passages  but  specially  as  grand  totalities 
whose  massive  architecture  had  defied  the  years  by 
the  thousand.  "When  our  Literary  School  was  get- 
ting under  way,  I  looked  around  for  lecturers  and 
tested  some  regular  Professors  of  Greek,  but  had  at 
last  mainly  to  fall  back  again  upon  Harris  and 
Davidson  as  fore-fronters  on  the  battle-line.  Both 
performed  their  tasks  faithfully,  but  dropped 
short  of  their  best,  for  neither  of  them  had  taken 
Homer  to  heart  and  in  a  manner  lived  him,  as  they 
had  Dante,  for  instance.  Rev.  Dr.  Swing  encour- 
aged us  with  his  presence,  doubtless  the  most  in- 
fluential in  Chicago,  and  in  his  lecture  gave  many 
humorous  touches  to  the  old  Greek  poet. 

Perhaps  the  most  distinctive  turn  in  this  School 
lay  in  the  two  Homeric  readings  of  English  hexa- 
meters. I  somehow  got  wind  of  the  fact  that 
George  Howland,  Superintendent  of  the  Public 
Schools  had  made  a  new  translation  of  Homer's 
Iliad,  preserving  the  original  meter.  After  several 
visits  I  succeeded  in  persuading  him  to  read  a 
couple  of  extracts  from  his  version  at  our  School, 
stressing  the  point  before  the  public  that  Chicago 
also  had  its  own  translation  of  Homer.  Howland 
gave  his  hexameters  in  a  rather  monotonous  sing- 
song, whereupon  Dr.  Swing  arose  from  the  au- 
dience and  deprecated  the  use  of  hexameters  in 
English  verse,  touching  up  his  remarks  with  little 
bits  of  his  peculiar  humor.  Howland  of  course  de- 
fended his  work,  showing  some  warmth  against  his 
own  minister,  who  was  Dr.  Swing,  and  otherwise 


562    THE  &T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

he  was  wrought  to  a  good  deal  of  excitement,  for  I 
noticed  his  profuse  perspiration.  Thus  flashed 
into  our  Homer  School  a  little  blaze  of  that  old 
controversy  about  English  hexameters,  in  which 
not  only  critics  but  eminent  poets  have  taken  part 
on  both  sides. 

I  kept  rather  quiet  during  the  debate,  only 
throwing  in  a  word  here  and  there  for  Howland. 
Still  I  felt  deeply  concerned  in  the  argument,  for  I 
had  been  guilty  of  many  thousand  hexameters  (in 
their  elegiac  form)  which  simply  overflowed  me  in- 
to self-expression  during  my  Classical  Journey 
some  ten  years  or  so  before  this  time.  But  there 
was  a  much  closer  and  deeper  reason  for  my 
present  interest:  I  had  spent  a  goodly  number  of 
my  best  moments  of  this  Homer  year  in  elaborating 
and  completing  a  long  cherished  plan  of  mine  to 
versify  in  hexameters  the  entire  cultural  evolution 
of  old  Homer  and  his  environing  world.  Prac- 
tically no  facts  had  come  down  to  us  concerning 
the  life  of  the  poet,  still  I  had  been  so  long  and 
so  intimately  associated  with  his  two  poems,  that 
I  felt  I  knew  his  personality  and  also  the  lines  of 
his  spiritual  development.  The  outcome  was  a 
book  which  I  named  Homer  in  Chios,  and  in  which 
I  have  the  poet  chant  the  epic  of  his  own  heroic 
career,  far  greater  in  import  than  that  of  any  of 
his  heroes.  This  work  I  would  make  the  singing 
harvest-home  of  all  my  protracted  Homeric 
studies. 

The  hour  for  closing  the  discussion  had  arrived 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         563 

when  I  took  the  word.  Dr.  Swing  in  his  clerical 
way  had  familiarly  given  other  speakers  and  my- 
self the  name  of  Brother  So-and-so ;  accordingly  I 
addressed  him  in  reply:  "Brother  Swing,  you 
have  called  the  hexameter  unnatural  in  English, 
yea,  quite  impossible.  But  I  have  found  it  gushing 
up  spontaneously,  as  if  by  some  inner  need  of  ex- 
pression in  a  book  which  I  daresay  you  have  often 
read  with  deep  appreciation,  namely  the  Psalms 
of  David.  In  fact  many  musical  staves  of  that 
book  fall  upon  my  ear  as  right  hexametral  rhythms, 
especially  on  account  of  the  sonorous  dactyls  in 
their  rolling  cadences.  Now  I  have  a  theory  that 
the  very  soul  of  David  had  some  inborn  kinship 
with  the  hexameter's  harmonies  (though  I  do  not 
know  his  Hebrew),  and  that  Homer  and  David,  the 
Greek  and  the  Semite,  had  this  peculiar  melodious 
gift  in  common,  as  their  abodes  were  not  so  very 
far  apart  and  they  might  possibly  have  been  con- 
temporaries; indeed  under  a  little  stretch  of  con- 
jecture they  might  have  personally  known  each 
other.  Now  let  me  tell  you  what  I  am  going  to  do : 
at  the  last  meeting  of  this  present  School  here  in 
Chicago  I  shall  bring  David  and  Homer  together  in 
a  tournament  of  song,  during  which  both  poets 
shall  chant  in  English  hexameters  the  Hellenic  and 
the  Hebrew  worlds  united  in  a  kind  of  marriage 
festival  for  all  future  time.  So  I  hope  our  city's 
first  preacher  (turning  to  Swing)  and  our  city's 
first  teacher  (turning  to  Howland)  will  be  present 
and  say  us  their  blessing  in  unison. ' ' 


564    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

But  neither  of  them  appeared  and  the  School 
devoted  its  last  meting  to  listening  to  the  mutual 
strains  of  Homer  and  David  lilted  through  the  lips 
of  a  Chicago  rhapsode,  none  other  than  our  direc- 
tor himself.  A  distinguished  Rabbi  was  present 
and  gave  a  sympathetic  address  which  bore  a  note 
of  benediction  to  Jew,  Greek  and  Christian,  some- 
what of  each  being  there  represented  in  our  mixed 
audience. 

Thus  terminated  the  first  quadrennium  of  the 
Chicago  Literary  Schools,  to  each  of  which  was 
given  a  year  not  only  of  intellectual  study,  but  of 
living  appropriation  as  far  as  this  was  possible. 
We  had  sought  to  realize  in  ourselves  the  cultural 
epochs  of  our  race's  development  through  their 
noblest  productions.  Specially  our  endeavor  had 
been  to  establish  a  little  point  of  fixity  and  per- 
manence in  the  everchanging  vortical  swirl  of  Chi- 
cago life.  To  this  end  we  had  interpreted  the 
greatest  books  of  Literature  as  the  eternal  record 
of  the  Eternal. 

Naturally  before  the  termination  of  this  last 
School,  the  question  often  came  up :  Shall  we  now 
quit  for  good  and  let  the  work  make  its  own  way 
hereafter?  The  proposition  was  much  discussed 
among  us,  and  evoked  some  variety  of  opinion. 
Finally  the  decided  majority  settled  down  to  this 
view:  "We  must  have  not  only  one  or  two  Schools 
more,  but  our  cause  summons  us  to  repeat  the  en- 
tire cycle  of  the  Four  Literary  Bibles.  Several 
reasons  were  given  but  mainly  three.     The  zealous 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         555 

learners  wished  to  go  over  the  whole  series  again 
for  their  own  behoof  in  a  kind  of  review.  Others 
deemed  the  work  a  needful  institution  in  Chicago 
as  a  counterpoise  to  its  dominant  ephemeral  ten- 
dencies in  character  and  in  writing.  Then  again 
the  School  was  vindicating  its  right  of  existence 
by  becoming  a  center  or  propagation,  since  it  was 
being  reproduced  in  other  cities. 

Thus  with  a  genuine  soldierly  determination  our 
little  army,  even  after  this  long  and  fairly  success- 
ful campaign  of  four  years,  felt  that  the  war  was 
not  yet  fully  won,  and  resolved  to  finish  their  work 
though  it  took  another  quadrennium. 

IV.  The  Second  Cycle  of  Four  Literary  Schools. 
So  we  start  with  fresh  courage  our  new  circum- 
navigation of  the  World's  Literature  as  revealed 
supremely  in  its  four  Literary  Bibles.  Again  we 
began  with  Dante,  seeking  to  repeat  the  triumph 
of  our  first  School,  which  had  been  our  grand  over- 
ture four  years  since.  But  the  conditions  were 
very  different. 

In  the  first  place,  Harris  would  not  come,  as- 
signing as  ground  of  refusal  the  press  of  business  in 
his  Bureau  of  Education  at  "Washington.  That 
made  an  ominous  chasm  at  the  entrance,  still  we 
sprang  over  it  and  pushed  onward.  Harris,  how- 
ever, repented  afterwards,  and  actually  asked  to  be 
present  at  the  remaining  three  Schols,  writing  me 
that  "he  could  not  afford  to  stay  away."  It  had 
come  home  to  him  that  this  was  the  right  successor 


566  THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS. 

of  his  Concord  School  of  Philosophy,  which  could 
not  be  held  up  even  by  his  absence. 

Then  I  had  my  little  trouble  over  Davidson 
again,  this  time  not  with  him  personally,  but  con- 
cerning him  with  others.  For  he  had  offended  my 
Kindergarten  supporters,  the  chief  fighting  cohort 
of  the  cause,  by  his  continual  kicking  in  the  traces, 
by  his  outside  attempts  to  deflect  the  School  from 
its  purpose,  and  now  finally  by  his  open  disparag- 
ment  of  the  Kindergarten  itself  and  its  educational 
value.  Decided  was  the  protest,  almost  a  revolt, 
whereupon  I  argued  with  leaders  about  as  follows : 
"Let  me  make  a  compromise  with  you.  I  agree 
that  it  is  best  not  to  invite  Mr.  Davidson  after  this 
one  time ;  we  have  heard  him  upon  Homer,  Shakes- 
peare, and  Goethe,  and  we  have  found  out  that  in 
our  sense  he  has  no  message  to  deliver  us  concern- 
ing these  great  poets.  Hence  we  may  well  drop 
him  from  our  future  Schools.  But  his  Dante  work 
is  unique  of  its  kind ;  he  not  only  reads  but  lives  the 
Italian  master's  book  as  gospel  of  a  Bible.  Such 
a  man  we  need  not  merely  as  lecturer  but  as  per- 
sonality. Moreover,  despite  all  my  urgency  Harris 
refuses  to  come,  and  Miss  Blow  is  not  obtainable. 
Accordingly  Davidson  is  a  necessity  this  time  more 
than  before.  But  let  it  be  the  last,"  I  added,  in 
regret  deeper  than  resentment. 

So  Davidson's  name  was  placed  on  the  program 
of  the  Fifth  Literary  School  of  Chicago  which  was 
held  Easter  week,  1892.  It  was  his  final  appear- 
ance among  us  as  lecturer,  indeed,  I  never  saw  him 


THE  CHICAGO  LITERARY  SCHOOLS.         567 

again.  He  survived  some  eight  years  longer,  having 
established  his  own  School  during  the  summer 
at  Glenmore  in  the  Adirondacks,  whither  I  never 
ventured.  His  last  activity  was  a  benevolent  cul- 
tural work  for  the  young  Jews  of  New  York  City — 
reported  to  be  the  crowning  labor  of  his  life. 
Strangely  our  careers,  in  spite  of  a  certain  mu- 
tual repulsion,  kept  interweaving  for  quite  twenty- 
five  years  (from  1867  till  1892)  and  insisting  upon 
some  kind  of  co-operation  despite  many  a  con- 
trariety. I  did  not  go  to  Glenmore  where  he  was 
autocrat,  as  I  could  not  feel  sure  of  him  nor  of  my- 
self. Hot  moments  were  not  wanting  there  with- 
out me,  if  rumor  have  any  veracity.  But  at  Chi- 
cago I  was  director  and  felt  equal  to  his  possible 
clash.  So  we  revolved  about  each  other  separate 
yet  inseparable,  like  two  little  luminaries,  in  St. 
Louis,  in  Eome,  in  Concord,  and  finally  in  Chi- 
cago. 

I  ought  to  add  that  underneath  all  these  open 
differences,  Davidson  and  I  were  conscious  of  many 
secret  concordances.  He  would  not  dwell  and  wal- 
low in  tradition,  he  loved  the  free  life  of  the 
scholar  errant,  he  disliked  the  arid  ways  of 
academicism,  he  cared  little  for  money  or  high  liv- 
ing, though  he  would  do  his  part  in  a  small 
carousal;  he  declared  once  that  he  lived  on  a  dol- 
lar a  day.  Especially  his  knowledge  and  love  of 
the  Greek  world  fascinated  me  in  my  earlier  St. 
Louis  time.  But  when  it  came  to  his  literary  and 
institutional  negations,  to  his  world-view  generally, 


568    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

and  also  to  his  temperament,  we  flew  asunder  and 
then  at  times  flew  back  again  for  a  tournament. 
Still  Davidson  evolved,  as  already  indicated;  he 
had  his  stages  of  development,  with  the  rest  of  us ; 
I  saw  him  in  what  may  be  called  his  first  period  at 
St.  Louis,  then  watched  him  pass  out  of  it  in  his 
flight  Eastward;  finally  I  could  not  help  remark 
him  at  Chicago  as  an  ageing  man  who  was  entering 
the  last  act  of  his  life-drama,  which,  however,  lies 
outside  of  my  personal  knowledge. 

Our  greatest  stroke  of  good  fortune  during  this 
time  I  deem  to  have  been  the  help  of  Dr.  David 
Swing,  the  most  winning  and  pre-eminent  per- 
sonality in  the  city,  who  always  took  the  trouble  to 
give  us  one  of  his  happiest  lectures,  as  well  as  to 
add  the  full  weight  of  his  name  to  our  rather  light- 
ballasted  argosy.  More  than  any  other  man,  he 
held  the  intellectual  primacy  of  Chicago,  and  in 
the  opinion  of  many  observers  he  has  had  no  suc- 
cessor to  his  position.  He  was  engaged  to  assist  us 
in  giving  a  suitable  conclusion  to  our  last  School, 
but  he  passed  away  before  it  came  off.  His  sad  de- 
parture tinged  more  deeply  the  farewell  mood  of 
our  closing  session. 

Necessarily  there  was  a  considerable  change  in 
the  program  of  lecturers,  whose  names  and  merits 
in  detail  cannot  be  here  recorded.  One  person, 
however,  I  must  single  out:  Mr.  Hamilton  W. 
Mabie  of  the  New  York  Outlook  who  assisted  us  not 
only  in  the  exercises  of  our  Literary  School,  but 
made  its  work  known  throughout  the  East  by  means 


TEE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND.    569 

of  his  influence  with  important  people  and  with 
the  Press.  Personally  I  owe  to  his  memory  a  debt 
of  gratitude. 

We  carried  through  with  fair  success  (not  too 
great)  our  Second  Shakespeare  School  and  our 
Second  Goethe  School  in  due  order,  but  they  must 
now  be  passed  over,  though  each  of  them  had  its 
own  special  history  and  character.  At  last  was  an- 
nounced the  Eighth  Annual  Literary  School  for 
1895,  the  subject  of  which  was  mainly  Homer, 
though  it  was  broadened  so  as  to  include  all  My- 
thology, whose  cultural  aspects  were  then  much 
discussed  in  Chicago  educational  circles,  especially 
in  the  Kindergarten.  I  presided  at  the  last  lec- 
ture, and  dismissed  the  audience  with  a  sort  of 
benediction,  feeling  that  an  old  Epoch  had  fruited 
but  that  underneath  it  a  new  Epoch  was  secretly 
budding.  The  last  leaf  of  all  our  long  Literary 
Bibles  was  turned  over  and  the  lid  shut  down  for 
the  nonce,  while  another  quite  different  Book 
seemed  to  be  opening  at  its  first  page.  And  my 
little  Kindergarten  army  still  stood  embattled  there 
before  me,  ready  for  another  campaign  in  a  fresh 
and  strange  territory. 

Winding  up  the  account,  I  may  here  re-affirm 
autobiographically  that  I  deem  this  succession  of 
eight  Literary  Schools  in  Chicago  as  the  greatest 
and  most  will-powerful  single  practical  achieve- 
ment of  my  life.  And  in  regard  to  the  St.  Louis 
Movement  on  its  literary  side,  as  distinct  from  its 
philosophical,    educational    and   psychological    ele- 


570    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

ments,  I  deem  this  to  have  been  its  most  fully  real- 
ized and  successful  work.  And  I  find  it  yet  remem- 
bered in  that  ever-obliterating,  vortical  swash  of  a 
community,  since  I  still  come  upon  various  re- 
minders of  it,  at  times  quite  unexpectedly.  Only  a 
couple  of  months  ago  (1919)  as  I  was  passing  into 
the  Chicago  Public  Library,  a  somewhat  aged  gray- 
framed,  angelic  lady-face  placed  itself  before  me, 
and  began  to  move  its  lips  thus:  ''You  do  not  re- 
call me,  but  I  attended  your  Literary  Schools  thirty 
years  ago.  I  have  off  and  on  reviewed  that  time 
ever  since,  and  have  spoken  of  it  to  my  friends. 
When  are  you  going  to  have  another  School  ?  Name 
the  date.  I  would  like  to  come  again  and  hear  you 
and  the  rest  of  the  lecturers  with  your  hot  discus- 
sions. "  "  Madam, ' '  I  replied,  ' '  those  speakers  have 
all  passed  beyond  but  me,  who  am  now  on  another 
job.  Consequently  the  next  Literary  School  will  be 
held  in  Heaven  when  I  get  there,  if  I  ever  do. 
Still  I  may  here  give  myself  the  pleasure  of  ex- 
tending to  you  a  hearty  invitation  to  that  happy 
re-union,  for  I  know  you  will  be  up  there." 


IX 

Backflow  to  St.  Louis 

Very  naturally  from  this  active  outpushing  cen- 
ter of  disturbance  at  Chicago  started  a  wave  of  re- 
surgence toward  St.  Louis,  a  backflow  we  may  call 


BACKFLOW  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  571 

it  to  the  original  fountain  head,  now  quiescent,  but 
possibly  capable  of  another  creative  upburst.  That 
is  indeed  the  trial  now  to  be  made. 

Accordingly,  before  I  proceed  on  that  grand  new 
adventure  of  mine  which  looms  up  in  the  future 
with  larger  proportions  than  even  those  of  the 
Literary  Bibles  in  the  past,  I  must  record  an  event 
of  some  significance  in  the  history  of  our  far-dis- 
persed but  still  dynamic  St.  Louis  Movement.  This 
was  the  endeavor  to  turn  the  current  of  these 
Literary  Schools  from  Chicago  back  to  their  primal 
genetic  source,  which  was  St.  Louis.  Can  there  be 
at  present  any  such  revival  in  the  old  deeply  dis- 
illusioned town  now  sunning  itself  reposefully  on 
the  banks  of  its  dreamily  murmuring  River  ? 

!No  sooner  had  our  first  Chicago  Dante  School 
passed  into  history,  with  a  good  deal  of  newspaper 
hullaballoo  about  itself,  than  the  echoes  reached 
St.  Louis  and  woke  it  up  to  a  little  spirt  of  its  an- 
cient rivalry.  I  began  to  receive  letters  thence 
from  former  members  of  my  classes  who  proposed 
to  transfer  the  Chicago  program  with  its  leading 
lecturers,  bodily  as  it  were,  to  their  old  home,  and 
to  establish  there  also  a  Literary  School,  into  which 
St.  Louis  had  never  been  quite  able  to  evolve  itself 
during  its  previous  cultural  epoch.  I  was  asked  to 
act  as  director,  while  some  ladies  of  wealth  and 
social  position  guaranteed  the  expenses  and  even 
the  audience.  The  Rev.  Dr.  R.  A.  Holland  was 
specially  active  in  the  project,  and  offered  the  use 
of  a  suitable  hall  free  of  charge  for  our  meetings. 


572   THE  8T-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

Under  such  auspices  took  place  the  first  St.  Louis 
Literary  School,  with  a  considerable  flurry  of  soar- 
ing enthusiasms  wafted  aloft  on  new-born  hopes. 

The  sere,  battered  program,  before  me  is  headed 
.in  heavy  capital  letters  Dante  School,  which  is  to 
be   held   in   St.   Louis   at   the   guild-room   of   St. 
George's    Church,    Chestnut   and   Twenty-seventh 
Streets  for  one  week,  during  which  ten  lectures  will 
be  given  by  the  following  persons :  Dr.  Harris,  Dr. 
Holland,  Prof.  Soldan,  Mr.  Snider,  and  Miss  Beedy. 
These  five  speakers  had  all  belonged,  directly  or  in- 
directly, to  the  old  St.  Louis  Philosophical  Society, 
reaching  back  some  twenty  years.    Thus  it  seemed 
a  re-union  of  the  prime  movers,  and  possibly  a  re- 
vival of  the  locally  lapsed  cause.     Cheery  words 
were  spoken  to  that  effect,  and  even  congratula- 
tions exchanged.     Still  it  had  to  be  confessed  that 
only  two  of  these  five  early  protagonists  had  re- 
mained residents  of  the  city,  and  not  long  after- 
wards one  of  these  two,  Dr.  Holland,  also  betook 
himself  to  flight.     Nevertheless  the  Dante  School 
was  pronounced  a  fair  success,   at  least  for  St. 
Louis ;  the  survivors  of  the  old  guard  were  on  hand 
and  eager  for  a  new  campaign,  though  all  of  us 
were  turning  grey  and  getting  furrowed  by  Time's 
envious  plow.    "When  the  exercises  were  over,  and 
Dr.    Holland  had   delivered   the   last   lecture,    or 
rather  enraptured  sermon  over  Dante's  White  Rose 
of  Heaven,  the  hardy  promoters,  nearly  all  of  them 
ladies,  met  together  and  resolved,  to  repeat,  with 
certain  omissions  and  additions,  the  Chicago  pro- 


BACKFLOW  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  573 

gram  of  the  coming  year.  Very  delightful  and  hope- 
inspiring  the  scene  rose  before  me  when  I  saw  this 
spontaneous  endeavor  to  revive  our  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment, especially  on  its  literary  line,  at  its  original 
starting-point.  Will  now  be  brought  about  our 
Movement's  Grand  Return,  with  its  restoration  to 
the  old  home  out  of  its  long  estrangement? 

Accordingly  the  second  St.  Louis  Literary  School 
took  place,  but  with  diminished  zeal,  I  think ;  still 
it  was  upheld  by  fair  attendance  and  adequate 
finance,  both  due  to  the  irresistible  assault  on  the 
rather  somnolescent  public  by  three  or  four  of  our 
veteran  women  who  seemed  determined  to  restore 
the  former  intellectual  primacy  of  the  city.  Even 
the  third  St.  Louis  Literary  School  was  essayed, 
if  I  remember  aright,  but  with  ever-waning  inter- 
est, when  any  further  repetition  of  Chicago  was 
given  up,  on  account  of  the  peculiar  mental  lethargy 
then  prevailing  in  our  community.  For  during 
those  years  St.  Louis  appeared  to  be  passing 
through  the  deepest  benightment  of  her  Great  Dis- 
illusion, whose  counterstroke  had  among  other  no- 
table malign  consequences  shivered  to  fragments 
and  scattered  to  the  four  winds  the  St.  Louis 
Movement,  which  by  means  of  the  present  Literary 
Schools  had  been  seeking  to  piece  itself  together 
again  on  the  home-hearth  of  its  nativity.  No — 
not— at  least  not  yet,  cry  the  frowning  Powers. 

Still  I  must  not  fail  to  mention  the  last  struggle, 
or  to  speak  more  forthrightly  the  dying  kick  of  the 
old  cause  in  the  old  town.    Some  years  afterward 


574    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

when  the  St.  Louis  Movement  seemed  to  have  be- 
come wholly  deceased  again,  and  even  to  be  buried 
in  its  ancestral  mausoleum,  it  started  mysteriously 
to  stir  once  more  and  to  show  signs  of  another  re- 
surrection. Yea,  it  appeared  to  get  a  spectral 
voice,  and  to  call  to  me  as  if  from  its  tomb  to  lead 
it,  evoking  me  (as  director)  to  a  fresh  onset. 
"Angels  and  ministers  of  grace,"  I  shouted  when 
I  heard  that  ghostly  cadence,  "how  can  it  be  that 
the  departed  spirit  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement  has 
arisen  again  here  from  its  native  soil?  What  new 
magical  power  is  this  which  in  these  days  can  raise 
the  dead?" 

Dropping  all  the  other  miraculous  accompani- 
ments which  to  me  at  least  appeared  not  a  few  nor 
meaningless,  let  the  kernel  of  reality  be  at  once  dis- 
criminated and  set  forth.  Miss  Mary  M'Culloch, 
superintendent  of  the  St.  Louis  Kindergartens  had 
the  courage  and  energy  to  work  up,  of  her  own 
initiative,  another  Literary  School  of  which  the 
subject  was  again  Dante,  the  great  poet  of  the  dis- 
embodied spirit-world,  who  still  seemed  to  be  here 
the  favorite  singer  of  the  four  supreme  ones — an 
echo  probably  out  of  former  St.  Louis  experiences. 
Indeed  we  sought  to  make  the  School  a  reuniting 
and  home-coming  of  all  the  old  St.  Louis  set  of 
spiritual  Danteizers,  three  of  them,  who  had  writ- 
ten books  on  Dante,  and  who  had  not  only  read  and 
studied  the  divine  Catholic  poet,  but  also  had  un- 
dergone a  kind  of  regeneration  and  religious  bap- 
tism through  his  writ,  of  which  unique  conversion 


BACKFLOW  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  575 

some  details  have  been  given  on  a  former  page. 
Three   of  our  most   eminent  people — Dr.   Harris, 
Prof.  Davidson,  and  Miss  Blow — partook  of  this 
peculiar  effluence,  and  they  were  all  still  in  life  at 
the  time  of  the  present  School,  though  no  longer  in 
St.  Louis.     But  each  of  them,  for  one  reason  or 
other,  failed  to  come,  though  I  tried  every  art  of 
persuasion  I  could  command,  especially  upon  Har- 
ris, who  in  has  later  years  seemed  to  me  to  show 
some  strange  aversion  even  for  a  short  St.  Louis 
visit.    So  it  came  about  that  I  was  unable  to  set  up 
once  more  to  our  city's  gaze  these  three  antique 
pillars  of  the  earlier  St.  Louis  Movement;  I  re- 
mained the  solitary  standing  monument  of  the  past 
getting  somewhat  hoary  already  then,  as  I  contem- 
plated my  half  of  a  century  and  more  of  fading 
and  falling  locks.     Thus  I  dreamed  me  of  that  old 
Roman  who  once  stood  mid  the  ruins  of  Carthage 
mooning  pensively  on  himself  and  his  city. 

But  let  me  hasten  to  add  that  this  last  St.  Louis 
Literary  School,  despite  its  belatement  and  other 
drawbacks,  was  the  most  pronounced  success  of  all 
in  numbers,  in  spiritedness,  and  in  a  certain  pro- 
clivity it  showed  for  a  wrangle,  not  vicious  but  en- 
tertaining. Such,  however,  was  the  finale.  Not 
since  then,  more  than  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago, 
has  there  been  any  attempt  to  revive  here  the  Lit- 
erary School,  as  far  as  I  am  aware ;  that  one  some- 
what convulsive  note  was  its  death-rattle.  The 
nearest  to  it  probably  was  a  course  of  talks  given 
by  me  many  years  later   (1908)   on  the  Literary 


576    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

Bibles  to  our  St.  Louis  Communal  University,  last- 
ing an  entire  season. 

Thus  the  St.  Louis  Movement  seemed  to  suffer 
a  complete  lapse  in  its  native  city,  while  manifest- 
ing considerable  energy  elsewhere.  In  spite  of  her 
peculiar  apathy  during  these  years,  I  believe  that 
there  was  in  St.  Louis  still  vitality  enough  left  over 
from  the  old  cause  to  keep  alive  and  active  the 
work,  if  a  leader  had  appeared  and  had  taken  hold 
of  it  with  the  pristine  strenuosity.  But  after  the 
departure  of  Miss  Blow,  the  last  one  to  leave,  no 
person  stepped  forward  to  organize  and  to  teach 
the  training  classes,  through  which  the  original 
momentum  of  the  work  was  to  be  maintained.  Un- 
doubtedly there  shot  up  many  study  clubs  of  all 
sorts  during  this  time  in  the  city;  but  they  were 
outside  of  and  often  away  from  the  St.  Louis 
Movement.  Moreover  in  the  latter  had  arisen  a 
deep  fracture  which  paralyzed  its  very  soul.  A 
few  words  upon  this  cardinal  and  far-ramifying 
event  cannot  be  omitted  from  its  history  without 
leaving  in  it  a  dark  and  profound  chasm. 

"When  I  was  invited  back  to  St.  Louis  in  1887-8 
to  give  some  talks  after  several  years'  absence,  I 
found  in  our  own  circle  a  state  of  personal  rancour 
and  factional  bitterness  which  simply  threatened 
its  dissolution.  The  trouble  centered  in  and  around 
Miss  Blow  along  with  her  institution,  the  Kinder- 
garten, which  had  become  divided  into  two  vio- 
lently antagonistic  parties,  whose  animosity  had 
infected  to  a  degree  the  whole  Public  School  Sys- 


BACKFLOW  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  577 

tern — quite  noticeably  its  Board  of  Directors  and  a 
number  of  its  leading  Principals.  I  who  bad  been 
absent  when  the  epidemic  broke  out,  happened  to 
drop  into  it  just  at  its  highest  rage,  and  was  dumb- 
founded at  first  both  by  its  intensity  and  its  extent. 
As  quickly  as  possible  I  sought  interviews  with  all 
sides,  not  alone  with  the  sets  of  fighting  partisans, 
but  especially  with  impartial  though  interested  and 
informed  onlookers.  Among  these  the  consensus  of 
opinion  expressed  itself  with  appreciation  but  with 
decision  that  the  great  Kindergarten  leader  had 
made  a  great  mistake,  apparently  the  mistake  of 
her  life. 

All  this  upheaval  recalled  very  vividly  to  mind 
the  Homeric  experience  with  Miss  Blow  once  in 
my  classes  years  before,  as  previously  recounted. 
Verily  I  could  not  help  thinking  that  I  had  already 
forefelt  some  such  fate  lurking  in  her  character, 
when  I  quit  St.  Louis  that  I  might  avoid  any  com- 
ing rupture  inside  our  own  circle,  which  even  then 
threatened,  though  perchance  only  in  a  small  way. 
Anyhow  I  at  least  imagined  that  I  as  a  tiny  individ- 
ual had  both  fore-thought  and  likewise  had  pre-en- 
acted  in  person  this  whole  conflict  here  raging  be- 
fore my  eyes,  but  at  present  outside  of  me.  So  I 
beheld  again  the  grand  Achillean  collision  as  an 
actual  contest  being  fought  over  anew  in  my  very 
presence  day  by  day,  and  still  driving  forward  in 
its  furious  march  to  its  last  consequences.  Not 
the  old  Greek  hero  now,  but  the  modern  American 
heroine  of  a  great  and  beneficent  work  I  witnessed 


578   THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

in  sharpest  opposition  to  the  established  authority 
over  her,  whereupon  had  resulted  her  complete  es- 
trangement from  her  people,  from  her  city,  and 
from  her  institution ;  yea,  she  seemed  alienated  for 
a  time  from  her  own  epochal  Great  Deed. 

She  was  reported  at  her  home  brooding  over  the 
wrong  which  she  deemed  had  been  done  to  her  per- 
sonal worth,  and  gnashing  her  heart  at  the  ingrati- 
tude of  those  whom  she  had  fostered  and  esteemed 
as  her  dearest  own.  It  so  happened  that  I  was  hav- 
ing a  class  in  Shakespeare  at  the  house  of  one  of 
her  lady-friends,  and  to  my  surprise  one  day  she 
appeared  there  sitting  before  me.  In  that  presence 
I  dared  glimpse  the  veiled  figure  of  an  extended 
hand,  and  even  hearken  a  faint  lisp  of  confession. 
Still  more  strangely,  our  lesson  chanced  to  be  King 
Lear  and  his  ungrateful  daughters,  which  life-lorn 
drama  seemed  to  hit  home  now  as  unerringly  as 
Homer's  Epic  once  did.  Of  course  the  part  of 
that  dramatic  ingratitude  was  not  neglected,  to 
whose  stress  the  oracular  face  there,  which  I  con- 
sulted, could  not  help  darting  brief  flashes  of  re- 
sponse. But  more  distinctively  I  dwelt  upon  the 
issue  that  Lear's  tragic  world  was  largely  the  crea- 
tion of  his  own  dictatorial  spirit,  that  his  fate  and 
that  of  his  family  sprang  from  his  pride's  curse  of 
an  autocratic  "Will.  In  that  somewhat  startled 
class  I  felt  the  thrill  of  an  actual  present  tragedy, 
as  its  members  with  lengthened  faces  filed  before 
me  out  of  the  room.  Then  the  heroine  I  approached 
and  saluted  with  my  best,  to  which  she  courteously 


BACKFLOW  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  579 

responded,  shooting  a  sad  smile  through  her  firmly 
knit  features.    She  came  again. 

The  strifeful  situation,  however,  would  not  im- 
prove, but  kept  haunting  me  with  an  ever-gnawing 
secret  worry,  for  I  felt  our  whole  Movement 
jeoparded.  Moreover  I  began  to  hear  the  stern 
call  to  put  some  of  my  fine  theories  into  practice. 
For  instance,  in  the  Iliad  I  had  emphasized  as  the 
supreme  worth  of  the  poem  for  all  time  the  hero's 
reconciliation,  indeed  his  double  reconciliation, 
with  his  own  people  first  (the  Greeks),  and  then 
with  his  enemies  (the  Trojans).  The  reflection 
kept  nagging  and  whispering  me :  "You  have  been 
whelmed  providentially  into  this  mad  tumult  of  a 
real  Homeric  wrath;  can  you  not  reconcile  that, 
turning  the  old  poem  into  present  fact,  and  thus 
vindicating  anew  the  truth  of  it,  which  will  surely 
prove  your  best  commentary  ?  Exemplify  in  your- 
self what  you  have  taught ;  realize  in  corresponding 
action  the  poet's  conciliating  words;  transfigure 
the  beautiful  image  into  its  very  life.  Then  you 
need  not  fail  to  consider  also  what  is  at  stake  in 
your  St.  Louis  Movement. ' ' 

Thus  for  days  my  thoughts  kept  prodding  their 
spurs  into  the  withers  of  my  unwilling  Will,  but  I 
Hamleted  all  my  good  resolves  away,  tetering  be- 
tween doing  and  undoing.  Then  I  heard  that  Har- 
ris was  coming  to  town  to  deliver  a  course  of  lec- 
tures; both  on  account  of  his  conciliatory  charac- 
ter and  his  influence  he  seemed  the  right  mediating 
personality.  Consequently,  as  soon  as  he  arrived,  I 


580    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

went  to  his  quarters  and  begged  him  to  be  the  peace- 
maker. To  my  astonishment  he  refused  with  a 
vehement  No;  he  could  not  think  of  descending 
alone  into  such  a  white-hot  Inferno  of  wrath,  where- 
of he  had  heard  a  good  deal  by  letter,  doubtless 
from  Miss  Blow  herself.  My  reply  was:  "But 
your  Dante  did,  and  if  you  will,  I  shall  go  with 
you  and  act  as  your  Virgil,  though  yours  must  now 
be  the  balm  of  the  healing  word."  Again  he  de- 
clined peremptorily  the  plan,  affirming  it  to  be 
utterly  useless,  and  even  a  fresh  aggravation,  where- 
upon he  turned  his  talk  to  something  else.  Disap- 
pointed I  was  soon  sauntering  homeward  some- 
what reproachful  of  what  I  deemed  his  timidity  in 
a  crisis. 

What  was  to  be  done  next?  Many  schemes  I 
maundered  over,  but  they  all  pushed  to  one  point: 
I  must  make  the  trial  alone,  though  at  first  I  would 
shrivel  at  the  thought.  Still  I  kept  up  the  fire-test 
of  will,  till  I  might  become  temper-proof.  Finally 
I  planned  that  my  best  opportunity  would  be  at  a 
conversation  (on  Homer  by  the  way)  which  I  was 
to  hold  in  a  neutral  parlor,  where  the  two  opposing 
sides  I  could  bring  together ;  then  at  the  close  they 
were  to  greet  each  other  with  a  friendly  word,  thus 
breaking  the  dam  and  thereupon  letting  the  water 
run  down  hill  of  itself.  The  one  party,  being  that 
of  my  special  friends,  was  eagerly  ready  to  be  per- 
suaded. Then  I  sent  a  request  to  Miss  Blow  for  a 
personal  interview,  which  she  granted.  That  was 
the  first  time  I  had  stepped  across  her  door-sill  for 


BACEFLOW  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  53! 

years,  indeed  since  that  former  flight  of  mine  from 
St.  Louis,  and  from  her.  I  advanced  toward  the 
center  of  her  drawing-room  where  she  stood  in  a 
rather  tense  attitude,  I  thought,  and  I  prefaced  my 
address  with  the  sentence:  "I  am  come  on  an  em- 
bassy from  the  heroless  Greeks  to  their  Achilles." 
The  allusion  caused  a  ripple  of  smiling  reminis- 
cence to  break  through  her  fixed  features,  after 
which  auspicious  little  omen  I  opened  the  whole 
plan  of  reconciliation  with  all  the  tact  I  owned, 
doubtles  not  much,  and  pressingly  invited  her  to 
be  present  at  my  coming  lesson. 

Miss  Blow  turned  her  look  on  the  floor  with  face- 
lines  relaxed  and  even  melting  for  a  moment;  but 
suddenly  every  muscle  seemed  again  to  brace  up 
and  tighten,  as  she  sent  back  at  me  with  deepening 
flushes  a  piercing  glance:  "No,  I  cannot,  it  would 
be  too  trying."  I  dared  lisp  the  reply,  "Better 
try  once  just  the  trying."  With  head  erect  she 
shot  me  a  more  determined  No,  looking  some 
haughtiness,  as  I  still  throbbingly  remember. 
Spoken  a  conventional  word  or  two  at  parting,  I 
bowed  myself  out  of  her  presence,  thwarted  per- 
sonally but  in  possession  of  her  grand  refusal  to  be 
reconciled  with  her  people,  with  her  achievement, 
with  herself. 

I  have  dwelt  in  some  detail  upon  this  interview 
for  several  to  me  co-ercive  reasons.  In  the  first 
place,  as  appreciative  autobiographer  I  claim  the 
egotistic  right  of  adjudging  this  deed  of  mine  as 
one  of  the  best,  if  not  the  very  best  of  my  life. 


582    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

I  had  to  flagellate  my  recalcitrant  and  quailing 
spirit  for  days  before  I  could  bring  myself  to  the 
final  test.  For  the  deed  was  better  than  I  was,  be- 
ing on  a  higher  level  than  my  average  self,  which 
also  had  the  native  bent  to  swoon  away  into  those 
Achillean  sullens,  and  quit  the  thankless  but  ap- 
pointed tasks  of  time.  Whatever  others  might 
think,  I  believed  that  Miss  Blow  in  the  primacy  of 
her  power  had  shown  the  grand  insolence  and  con- 
sequent fatuity  of  success,  ever  the  tragic  thread 
spun  by  the  Fates  into  the  heroic  soul.  Now  her 
overturn  had  come,  certainly  not  through  any  act 
of  mine ;  now  she  was  down  and  under,  and  her  lot 
called  for  some  reconciling  voice.  I  heard  and  an- 
swered at  last,  swallowing  the  mordant  dose  after 
repeated  regurgitations.  I  have  too  few  best  deeds 
to  my  credit,  not  to  write  this  one  down  with  an 
underscore  among  my  life 's  triumphs.  Others  may 
make  such  self-conquests  easily — not  I. 

In  the  second  place  upon  this  Grand  Refusal  (let 
me  capitalize  for  emphasis)  of  hers  pivoted  the 
existence  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement  in  its  birth- 
home.  She,  the  heroine,  held  here  both  the  intel- 
lectual and  the  practical  leadership,  especially  after 
the  flight  of  all  of  us  retreating  males.  But  now 
she  too  abandons  the  battle-line,  and  lets  the  enemy 
conquer.  Thus  she  quits  her  native  city,  her  crea- 
tive work,  her  center  of  dissemination,  surrender- 
ing herself  to  her  unreconciled  mood.  Of  course, 
other  reasons  for  her  withdrawal  may  have  played 
in,  and  these  she  would  naturally  stress  to  the  pub- 


BACKFLOW  TO  ST.  LOUIS.  5g3 

lie.  At  any  rate  with  her  departure  the  St.  Louis 
Movement,  passed  henceforth  into  its  nethermost 
local  evanishment,  especially  after  the  cessation  of 
the  little  revival  caused  by  the  Literary  .Schools. 
Judging  from  her  past  I  hold  that  she,  and  she 
alone,  united  all  the  gifts  needful  to  keep  alive  and 
to  complete  the  work,  if  she  could  have  been  re- 
conciled to  remain  at  home  here  on  its  native  soil 
and  hers,  realizing  herself  in  the  full  panoply  of 
her  will-power. 

But  the  deepest  and  most  enduring  disruption 
sprung  of  this  her  Grand  Refusal  (her  own  Dante's 
gran  rifiuto  down  in  the  Inferno)  lay  in  herself, 
since  it  nearly  turned  her  life  into  a  persistent 
tragedy.  She  sank  away  into  a  long  physical  ill- 
ness and  mental  subsidence,  doubtless  something  of 
a  purgatorial  if  not  infernal  journey.  During  this 
time  she  underwent  a  great  spiritual  change,  the 
special  stages  of  which  I  do  not  know.  But  I  ob- 
served her  at  the  entrance  and  again  at  the  exit 
of  this  strangely  human  eclipse  of  her  soul's  sun. 

First  let  me  explain*  that  I  watched  her  in  St. 
Louis  as  she  was  passing  into  her  occultation,  so  I 
think  it  may  for  our  help  be  metaphored.  That 
Grand  Refusal  in  her  case  meant  not  merely  to  re- 
fuse my  little  attempt  at  peace-patching,  but  some- 
thing far  larger;  indeed  she  made  it,  so  to  speak, 
universal,  directing  it  against  her  very  self's  own 
world.  I  thought  that  she  seemed  willing  for  a 
while  to  undo  her  sovereign  work  in*  the  Kinder- 
garten, or  at  least  to  retire  and  let  it  perish  un- 


584    THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

mothered.  The  report  was  current  that  she  had 
aroused  in  the  School  Board,  through  her  defiance 
of  its  authority  (Achilles  again)  a  movement  to 
abolish  the  public  Kindergarten — that  which  tow- 
ered up  her  high  heroic  educational  act,  and  which 
was  now  becoming  more  national  every  day.  But 
authority  did  not  proceed  so  far,  dared  not,  I  think, 
in  its  own  interest.  So  the  power  was  not  permitted 
her  to  destroy  her  own  Great  Deed,  which  could  no 
longer  be  slain  even  by  its  own  Great  Doer,  still 
less  by  its  enemies.  For  she  had  built  an  institu- 
tion mightier  than  herself,  and  thus  had  performed 
an  action  more  enduring  than  any  particular  ac- 
tion of  hers,  verily  more  eternal  than  her  mere  in- 
dividual life.  That  showed  her  greatness,  yea,  her 
immortal  selfhood,  even  in  spite  of  herself. 

Such  was  my  last  glimpse  of  her  as  she  vanished 
into  her  career's  eclipse,  for  so  I  construe  it, 
through  her  Grand  Refusal  at  her  life's  central 
node.  And  now  for  my  second  and  more  pulveriz- 
ing stroke  of  amazement !  After  long  years  I  saw 
her  emerge  from  that  dread  obscuration  of  bodily 
illness  and  seeming  despair  through  one  heroically 
persistent,  prodigious  act  of  Will,  and  begin  her 
life  over  again — in  many  respects  a  new  person- 
ality, whom  I  may  name  the  second  Miss  Blow.  Re- 
conciled afresh  with  her  Institution  and  with  her- 
self, she  sallies  forth  on  what  may  be  called  her 
second  grand  campaign  quite  different  from  her 
first  at  St.  Louis,  and  lasting  many  years.  Behold ! 
Here  she  comes  to  us  lecturing  again  with  young 


THE  EPOCH'S  CROSSING.  585 

vigor — a  kind  of  resurrection  from  what  seemed 
the  grave's  forewarning  doom.  Rather  charily  I 
approached  the  old  familiar  semblance  when  I  saw 
her  rise  once  at  Chicago,  and  I  greeted  her  to  me 
weird  re-appearance  as  if  she  almost  might  be  a 
ghost.  But  one  reconciliation  she  refused  still ;  she 
would  not  come  back  to  her  home,  her  city,  her 
folk.  She  declined  making  St.  Louis  her  second 
center  of  propagation  and  turned  from  the  West 
to  the  East,  where  she  stayed  to  the  close — a  mis- 
take I  think,  but  not  fatal. 

Still  the  second  Miss  Blow  belonged  to  the  St. 
Louis  Movement,  indeed  she,  according  with  the 
deepest  strain  of  her  character,  could  not  help 
sharing  in  its  evolution.  Again  her  life-stream  will 
persist  somehow  in  intersecting,  briefly  and  very 
occasionally  but  never  without  a  splash  of  energy 
and  combativeness,  the  autobiographic  flow  of  this 
book.  Yes,  reader,  we,  both  you  and  I,  may  be 
pretty  certain  of  crossing  her  war-path  again,  if 
we  can  hold  out  to  the  printed  close. 

X. 

The  Epoch's  Crossing. 

Already  several  times  in  the  course  of  the  fore- 
going narrative,  casual  remarks  have  been  dropped 
along  our  path  that  the  present  Epoch  was  draw- 
ing to  an  end.  Even  the  loitering  reader  will  have 
observed  certain  prognostics  of  a  coming  change. 
So  here  I  may  emphasize  that  the  last  Chicago 
Literary  School,  in  1895,  may  be  taken  as  one  of 


586    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

life's  turning-points  out  of  an  older  transcended 
stage  into  something  new.  Still  let  not  the  year's 
limit  be  too  rigidly  fixed;  old  Time  cannot  be  held 
up  by  a  date. 

Encircling  this  year,  however,  as  a  kind  of 
rounding-up  era  seemed  to  gather  for  a  conclusion 
the  main  achievements  of  an  Epoch,  which  I  have 
numbered  the  Second  or  Middle  one  of  my  life's 
long  central  Period  lasting  almost  a  generation 
from  young-manhood  to  the  verge  of  old-age.  Now 
the  special  work  of  this  present  expiring  Epoch  I 
may  here  repeat  once  more,  has  centered  on  the 
Literary  Bibles — their  evolution,  elaboration,  and 
propagation,  till  the  final  act  of  printing  and  dis- 
tributing the  results  of  the  labors  of  this  persistent 
"Writer  of  Books.  But  that  task  also  is  completed, 
the  nine  volumes  of  Commentaries  are  all  written — 
only  one  belated  tome  remains  to  be  typed  (the 
Commentary  on  the  Odyssey,  1897).  Strangely, 
too,  the  once  unresting  wanderlust  seems  to  slow 
down,  though  not  yet  extinct. 

Moreover  my  anchorage  on  Chicago  was  visibly 
loosening,  doubtless  in  part  through  the  feeling  that 
I  had  there  done  my  work  and  delivered  my  mes- 
sage, having  sped  our  Movement  in  that  city  for 
more  than  ten  of  my  best  years.  Quite  a  long  spell 
was  that  to  hold  out  in  the  Chicago  vortex — so  I 
titill-ated  myself  silently  in  my  little  nook  on 
Rookery  Square,  looking  backwards.  That  once 
dreamed  ambition  of  mine  had  been  in  a  small 
measure  fulfilled:  one  tiny  green  islet  of  Eternity 
right  in  the  heart  of  fleetingest  modern  Ephem- 


THE  EPOCH'S  CROSSING.  587 

erality  I  had  actually  built,  planted,  and  stabilized 
for  a  decade.  Now  it  must  be  left  to  itself,  remain- 
ing a  stray  shred  of  influence,  or  perchance  only  a 
memory  on  a  time,  for  already  has  arisen  over  me 
another  task  pressing  pitiless  upon  the  residue  of 
my  days. 

There  can  be  no  doubt,  however,  that  beyond 
my  limited  range  Chicago  had  been  undergoing  a 
great  intellectual  transformation  during  these  ten 
years,  as  I  watched  her  not  only  from  the  outside, 
but  also  participated  in  her  soul-life  from  within. 
Already  has  been  duly  signalized  her  "World's  Fair, 
a  globe-startling  upburst  not  merely  of  elemental 
strength,  but  of  subtle  beauty  and  lofty  grandeur, 
of  which  latter  she  had  never  been  remotely  sus- 
pected. Then  the  new  Chicago  University  was  in 
the  process  of  being  conceived  and  organized;  it 
had  already  risen  above  the  horizon,  just  as  our  last 
Literary  School  sank  out  of  sight.  Thus  I  dare 
couple  together  the  enormously  large  and  the  com- 
paratively little  in  my  autobiographic  Ego,  to  which 
they  both  made  appeal,  each  in  its  own  way. 

The  Chicago  University,  like  every  thing  started 
in  that  phenomenal  town,  had  its  unique  phenome- 
nal origin  and  character.  Rockefeller's  millions, 
aided  by  the  naturally  purchasing  spirit  of  the 
community,  had  practically  bought  a  complete 
German  University,  somewhat  as  if  it  were  a  valu- 
able European  book  or  picture  or  piece  of  mer- 
chandise, with  its  full  equipment  of  men,  material, 
and  libraries,  then  had  lifted  it  out  of  its  home- 
soil,  sailed  with  it  "across  the  Atlantic,  and  set  it 


588   THE  ST-  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

down  here  in  the  West  along  the  Michigan  lakeside. 
A  marvelous  achievement,  and  I  hold,  the  best 
medicine  for  the  time  and  the  place.  It  was  indeed 
the  hugest  sudden  dose  of  old-world  traditionalism 
that  was  ever  administered  to  any  mundane  patient. 
To  me  it  seemed  just  the  antidote  needed  to  hu- 
manize and  to  steady  crude  ephemeral  vortical  Chi- 
cago— a  far  mightier  and  more  drastic  remedy  than 
my  single  easy  homeopathic  pillules  of  brief  indi- 
vidual prescription,  which  moreover  had  now  ex- 
hausted its  service. 

In  this  connection  I  may  be  privileged  to  jot 
down  a  small  personal  point.  The  Chicago  Uni- 
versity, though  liberal,  declared  itself  a  Baptist  In- 
stitution, and  therein  followed  the  religious  denomi- 
nation of  its  founder.  In  my  classes  I  had  several 
friendly  Baptist  ladies,  one  of  whom,  very  influen- 
tial with  her  fellow-members,  caught  the  ambition 
of  making  me,  without  my  knowledge,  a  Professor 
in  the  new  University.  She  went  so  far  as  to  sound 
President  Harper,  with  neutral  result,  I  imagine, 
and  then  she  proceeded  to  sound  me.  I  had  already 
known  two  or  three  such  opportunities  in  the  past, 
and  so  my  answer  was  prompt :  "No — I  am  unfitted 
for  any  position  of  that  sort.  I  have  been  a  free 
lance  too  long,  with  my  own  University,  the  com- 
munal, fermenting  in  my  head  and  in  my  heart. 
That  would  not  well  comport  with  the  present  over- 
mastering tradition  which  is  now  to  be  schooled 
into  Chicago  and  ought  to  be,  very  emphatically. 
Well  do  I  know  myself  not  the  man  for  that  task, 


THE  EPOCH'S  CROSSING.  589 

however  necessary.  Moreover  I  can  glimpse  a  big 
fight  developing  with  time  inside  this  imported 
University  and  inside  its  most  aspiring  Professors 
concerning  just  this  tradition  and  its  external 
authority.  Much  obliged,  my  very  appreciative 
friend;  but  permit  me  now  to  resign  the  position 
to  which  I  have  never  been  elected — not  by  the 
University  regents  and  not  by  myself." 

Verily  the  appointed  Professor,  who  is  deter- 
mined to  be  self-determined  in  his  academic  career, 
has  become  to-day  a  shrilling  problem  of  our  higher 
education.  From  such  a  worried  conflict  I  held 
aloof  both  through  temperament  and  conceived 
duty.  Besides,  when  I  saw  Prof.  Richard  G.  Moul- 
ton  established  in  the  Professorship  of  what  he 
called  "Literature  in  English,"  I  felt  that  the 
Literary  Bibles  would  have  a  worthy  promulgator 
in  the  Chicago  University.  At  any  rate,  I  realized 
I  was  done  with  them,  and,  what  was  more  decisive, 
they  were  done  with  me. 

Still,  underneath  all  these  outer  conjunctures, 
lay  fermenting  the  deeper  ultimate  motive:  my 
spirit's  evolution,  or  my  Super- vocation  was  de- 
manding a  new  and  more  adequate  self-expression. 
I  had  outgrown  my  long-cherished  literary  Orga- 
non,  and  another  more  internal  and  intensive  one 
was  throbbing  for  birth.  And  that  completely  free 
utterance  (my  dearest  libertas  philosophandt)  re- 
quired for  its  play  the  Universe,  not  the  university. 
Accordingly  another  Renascence  with  its  renewal 
and  re-creation  starts  a  fresh  Epoch  of  development. 


CHAPTER  THIRD. 

The  Psychological  Renascence. 

First  of  all,  let  it  be  said  that  this  was  a  Return 
locally  to  the  old  home-town  after  a  long  separa- 
tion— a  circling  back  to  the  original  starting-point 
of  the  St.  Louis  Movement.  Such  an  outer  Return 
had  its  inner  spiritual  side,  otherwise  it  would  be 
of  very  evanescent  significance. 

Look  back  from  here,  my  forgiving  reader,  over 
a  good  many  leaves  of  this  ever-lengthening  book 
(see  page  229),  and  you  will  find  a  brief  forecast 
and  ordering  of  the  stage  at  which  we  have  arrived, 
and  which  we  label  anew  the  Pyschological  Rena- 
scence as  distinct  from  that  old  Classical  Rena- 
scence, whose  long  discipline  we  have  hitherto  tra- 
versed and  transcended.  You  may  recall  the  quest 
as  I  followed  backward  our  race's  European  line 
of  civilization  till  I  reached  what  I  deemed  the 
historic  germ,  or  the  primordial  cell  of  our  early 
evolution  in  Parnassian  Hellas.  But  now  we  are 
to  undertake  not  an  outer  spatial  Itinerary,  but  an 
inner  selfful  one,  not  a  journey  to  the  Castalian 
spring  but  to  the  fountain-head  of  Mind  itself,  of 
our  very  Consciousness,  whose  original  elementary 
unit  or  germ  we  are  to  find,  to  name,  and  to  unfold 
into  its  completely  ordered  System.  This  is  still  a 
Renascence,  but  of  the  Self,  of  the  Soul  or  Psyche, 
hence  is  called  psychological.     Such  is  the  general 

590 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  RENASCENCE.         591 

idea  of  this  new  transition  in  the  Self's  own  evolu- 
tion, which  for  some  time  had  lain  secretly  brood- 
ing in  my  underworld,  when  an  incident  of  the 
moment  awakened  it  to  daylight  and  sudden 
activity. 

One  day  early  in  1894,  as  I  time  my  memory,  I 
happened  to  pay  a  visit  to  the  lady  principal,  Miss 
Elizabeth  Harrison,  of  our  Kindergarten  College, 
when  I  found  her  pacing  the  parlor  floor  in  some 
perturbation,  and  repeating  not  so  much  to  me  as 
to  herself:  "Our  teacher  of  Psychology  is  sick  in 
a  distant  sanitarium,  and  cannot  take  his  classes. 
I  have  sought  everywhere  and  can  find  no  instruc- 
tor. The  work  ought  to  begin  at  once.  "Well,  well, 
what  next?"  Thereupon  she  stopped  and  looked 
off  into  silent  vacancy,  as  if  for  some  unknown  far- 
away hand  of  the  Invisible. 

Now  it  so  co-incided  that  just  this  subject  of 
Psychology  had  been  recently  knocking  at  my 
spirit's  door  for  a  fresh  renewal  of  ancient  ties  of 
acquaintanceship.  Some  twenty-five  years  before 
the  preceding  incident  I  was  teaching  the  old  Psy- 
chology, then  called  Mental  Philosophy,  in  the  St. 
Louis  High  School,  and  had  wrought  it  over  and 
organized  it  pretty  thoroughly  according  to  Hegel, 
who  was  at  that  time  the  master-mind  of  our  St. 
Louis  Philosophical  Society,  and  who  had  saturated 
our  practical  pedagogy,  especially  through  the  in- 
fluence of  Superintendent  Harris.  I  still  could 
recall  the  whole  course  and  its  details,  as  I  had  often 
given  it  to  classes  in  the  High  School  and  outside 


592    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

in  the  Community.  Moreover  I  had  kept  a  pretty- 
full  manuscript  of  it  in  cold  storage  during  a  quar- 
ter of  a  century,  inasmuch  as  the  European  Journey 
and  the  Literary  Bibles  had  wholly  banned  it  from 
my  active  life,  and  even  from  my  mind's  presence. 
But  this  Epoch,  as  I  have  already  indicated,  showed 
numerous  signs  of  drawing  to  a  close,  having  indeed 
quite  spent  itself.  Besides  I  had  been  watching 
the  rise  of  Psychology  to  the  fore-front  of  the  New 
Education,  ever  since  I  heard  Professor  James  at 
Concord  in  1883.  In  fact  I  had  unconsciously  felt 
its  pulse-beat  as  the  coming  world-discipline.  I  did 
not  know  it,  but  I  was  getting  ready  and  even 
praying  silently  for  the  new  epiphany. 

Now  drops  down  upon  me  with  a  sudden  impact 
this  unique  opportunity  voiced  by  our  principal. 
I  deliberated  for  a  moment;  then  when  I  heard 
slowly  lisp  from  the  same  lips  in  a  kind  of  wavering 
revery,  ""We  know  not  what  to  do,"  my  decisive 
answer  plumped  out  at  once:  "I'll  take  it,  I  can 
teach  your  class  in  Psychology."  "What!  you! 
None  of  your  banter,  this  is  too  serious. ' '  It  must 
be  remembered  that  I  was  known  in  Chicago  chiefly 
for  my  literary  work  and  its  propagation,  which 
now  had  been  going  on  there  for  about  ten  years. 
Accordingly  I  gave  some  account  of  my  former  St. 
Louis  time  of  philosophic  Psychology.  Whereupon 
followed  the  question:  "When  can  you  start?" 
"To-morrow."     "Come." 

Such  was  the  little  punch  of  destiny  which  as  it 
were  squeezed  me  into  a  wholly  new  passage  of 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  RENASCENCE.        593 

my  life-work.  There  seemed  to  focus  on  that  one 
spot  and  in  that  one  moment  a  triple  call,  as  I 
construe  it  now.  First  came  the  immediate  press- 
ing request  of  the  School,  which  was  manned,  or 
rather  womanned,  by  my  valiant  Kindergartners, 
who  for  a  decade  had  fought  along  with  me  the 
testful  Chicago  battle  of  the  Literary  Bibles.  But 
the  second  voice  had  also  been  whispering  me  at 
intervals:  ''The  psychological  age  is  dawning,  up 
and  be  a-doing!"  The  third  summons,  however, 
was  getting  to  be  most  insistent  and  personal  of  all : 
"You  must  win  a  fresh  living  self-expression  not 
merely  for  your  intellectual  satisfaction  and  growth, 
but  for  your  soul's  salvation.  Start — start  now  at 
the  nick  of  golden  opportunity ;  your  present  voca- 
tion has  fulfilled  itself — arise  or  be  forever  fallen." 
That  evening  I  retreated  to  my  corner  in  Hotel 
Goodenough,  and  began  to  ponder  over  what  I  had 
so  impulsively  or  only  half  consciously  promised. 
What  does  it  all  mean?  But  the  immediate  task 
was  urging  me  furiously,  so  I  let  the  future  slide 
on  and  explain  itself  in  its  own  way,  which  it  always 
will.  I  gave  that  first  course  of  a  few  weeks,  which 
slowly  expanded  to  the  most  intense  and  creative 
Epoch  of  my  life,  lasting  quite  a  dozen  years.  My 
little  psychological  snow-ball,  having  once  started 
to  rolling,  would  not  stop  with  one  round  nor  with 
dozens  of  them,  but  kept  on  till  it  would  encircle 
the  universe  in  its  folds.  It  becomes  not  my  plan 
at  present  to  give  any  account  of  this  long  desperate 
adventure,  with  its  multitudinous  ups  and  downs, 


594    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

though  it  be  fuller  of  myself  (that  is,  of  my  own 
original  selfhood)  than  any  other  portion  of  my 
life 's  errantry. 

But  this  autobiographic  Ego  of  mine  may  here 
succinctly  state  that  it  now,  after  so  hot  and  so 
prolonged  a  search  for  the  source  of  all  Tradition, 
has  reached  back  to  the  primal  traditional  form  of 
its  own  first  genesis.  It  has  found  that  itself  in 
its  very  birth,  is  a  transmitted  thing,  which,  how- 
ever, is  again  to  originate  itself;  a  created  object 
it  is  whose  ultimate  essence  is  to  recreate  its  own 
creation,  and  thus  to  be  self-creative.  Or  to  use 
more  direct  speech,  I,  through  this  long  searchful 
process  of  self -voyaging  and  self-discovery  and  also 
self-construction,  came  gradually  upon  the  primor- 
dial unit  or  the  original  germ  of  universal  creativ- 
ity, which  I  named  The  Psychosis.  But  this  em- 
bryo of  the  Universe,  ever  reproducing  its  own 
process,  evolves  out  of  itself  its  own  creative  body, 
or  complete  psychical  organism  as  the  all-organizer 
of  the  world  and  of  man  as  well  as  of  itself.  To 
such  a  worker  or  instrument  is  given  the  name 
corresponding  to  its  character:  The  Psychological 
Organon.  Finally  this  all-organizer  must  reveal 
itself  in  the  work  done,  or  in  the  All  as  organized, 
both  externally  and  internally.  Thus  unfolds  The 
Psychological  System,  embracing  the  World  and 
the  Self  ordered  psychically  or  according  to  the 
Psychosis,  which  is  the  unit  of  Mind,  distinct  from 
yet  creative  of  the  unit  of  Matter — the  atom ;  and 
also  distinct  from  yet  creative  of  the  unit  of  Life — 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  RENASCENCE.        595 

the  cell.  (Of  this  System  and  its  various  divisions 
the  reader  will  find  an  outline  in  the  appendix.) 

Here  without  delay,  I  must  select  and  singly  em- 
phasize the  pre-eminent  conjuncture  of  this  Epoch, 
or  rather  the  topmost  flowering  of  the  whole  St. 
Louis  Movement,  in  so  far  as  I  had  anything  to  do 
with  it.  Though  I  deem  the  Chicago  Literary 
Schools  my  supreme  personal  achievement,  a 
greater  deed  than  that  was  now  to  be  done  in  St. 
Louis,  chiefly  through  the  co-operative  work  of  two 
able  and  well-known  teachers.  Miss  Amelia  C. 
Fruchte  in  1906  was  chosen  President  of  the  Peda- 
gogical Society,  which,  from  a  small  and  seemingly 
moribund  club,  at  once  increased  under  her  inspir- 
ing leadership  to  more  than  2,000  members.  For 
this  large  body  of  students  Miss  Fruchte  with  her 
assistants  organized  numerous  special  courses  on 
various  subjects.  The  result  was  a  unique  Com- 
munal University  which  appeared  to  build  itself  up 
over  night,  and  which  may  be  acclaimed,  I  think, 
the  most  considerable  practical  feat  in  the  history 
of  the  St.  Louis  Movement,  of  which  Miss  Fruchte 
had  long  been  a  faithful  co-worker. 

IBut  of  these  numerous  courses  the  most  distinc- 
tive and  tone-giving,  as  well  as  the  most  successful, 
was  that  of  Professor  Francis  E.  Cook  on  Psychol- 
ogy, or,  more  specially  stated,  on  the  Psychological 
Organon,  embracing  Intellect,  Will,  and  Feeling, 
which  he  unfolded  in  three  different  courses  during 
three  successive  years.  His  regular  audience  for 
such  an  abstruse  and  difficult  subject  was  the  larg- 


596    THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT— PART  SECOND. 

est  I  ever  saw  anywhere — in  St.  Louis,  Concord,  or 
Chicago.  The  number  of  his  hearers  often  rose  to 
one  hundred  and  fifty,  and  never  fell  below  a  hun- 
dred. A  dozen  or  so  was  usually  our  old  St.  Louis 
philosophical  quota.  Professor  Cook's  luminous 
and  poetically  beautiful  presentation  of  the  pro- 
foundest  thought  made  its  appeal  not  merely  to  the 
head,  but  to  the  heart  and  imagination  of  all  his 
listeners.  I  regard  this  course  of  his  as  the  crown- 
ing act  of  the  long  line  of  expositors  of  the  St.  Louis 
Movement  from  its  earliest  start ;  and  in  like  man- 
ner I  regard  Miss  Fruchte's  aforesaid  work  as  the 
towering  single  deed  of  organization  in  the  whole 
history  of  our  Movement,  on  whose  summit  there 
stands  at  this  point  a  woman  as  leader. 

Such  is  the  merest  mention  of  what  is  deserving 
a  full  record,  which,  however,  cannot  now  be  given. 
A  surprisingly  sudden  fresh  upburst  of  the  old  St. 
Louis  Renascence  into  new  forms — will  it  hold? 
Never  mind  that  here,  for  we  have  come  to  the  clos- 
ing scene  of  the  present  ascent  of  life,  having 
reached  its  happiest  and  highest  altitude,  from 
which  we  shall  not  now  make  or  even  contemplate 
the  descent,  but  let  it  hide  itself  in  futurity. 

Accordingly  this  book  of  mine  insists  on  winding 
itself  up  and  quitting  just  here  in  a  manner  without 
my  concurrence,  since  I  had  foreplanned  a  different 
outcome  for  it,  and  a  somewhat  different  progress. 
But  matters  not  intended  have  forced  themselves 
into  its  narrative;  other  things  blocked  out  in  ad- 
vance have  been  ruthlessly  pitched  off  along  the 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  RENASCENCE.        597 

wayside.  That  is,  the  present  book  has  obstinately- 
persisted  in  writing  itself  after  its  own  law  more 
than  ever  before  in  my  history,  though  I  had  been 
made  aware  of  a  similar  over-ruling  in  previous 
volumes  of  mine.  For  example,  I  had  designed  to 
include  in  this  final  Epoch  my  full  psychological 
evolution,  but  the  pen  refuses,  or  the  spirit,  if  you 
can  think  so,  presiding  over  this  book  dashes  mas- 
terfully his  veto  on  my  scheme,  enjoining  me  "Your 
psychological  day  is  not  yet  sundown,  you  are  living 
it  still,  all  harnessed  and  at  work;  it  has  yet  to 
finish  and  perchance  to  tell  its  own  story." 

Only  one  more  paragraph,  or  possibly  two,  may 
be  permitted  for  a  heart-felt  obituary,  as  a  parting 
farewell  breathed  from  the  soul  of  the  still  living 
and  unforgetting  St.  Louis  Movement  to  its  first, 
now  old-aged  founders  as  they  vanish  from  the  day 
of  life.  In  this  same  pivotal  year  of  1906,  when 
the  Psychological  Organon  had  completed  itself  as  a 
written  work  to  face  its  unknown  destiny  of  coming 
time,  when  the  new-born  association  of  workers 
headed  by  Miss  Fruchte  and  Professor  Cook  had 
leaped  forth  in  multitudinous  youthful  energy,  and 
when  the  St.  Louis  Movement  itself,  after  its  long 
Ulyssean  wanderings  of  more  than  twenty  years, 
had  gotten  back  to  its  old  home  by  the  riverside  for 
its  life's  renewal  and  rejuvenescence,  Governor 
Brockmeyer,  its  first  President,  passed  away  at  the 
rounding  of  his  eightieth  birth-day.  In  this  same 
year  Doctor  Harris,  its  first  Secretary,  also  its 
greatest  educator  and  zealous  promoter,  retired  from 


598   THE  ST.  LOUIS  MOVEMENT—PART  SECOND. 

his  official  position  as  head  of  the  National  Bureau 
of  Education,  still  aspiring  though  broken  by  ill 
health,  to  which  he  succumbed  not  long  afterwards. 
Unto  both  their  paternal  spirits  the  St.  Louis  Move- 
ment bids  a  grateful  last  salutation — Vale  et  Vive. 
So  let  their  names  be  again  twinned  together,  as 
at  the  beginning  of  this  record  so  now  at  its  close, 
in  the  bond  of  ever-living  affection  and  memory 

Henry  C.  Brockmeyer 
William  T.  Harris 


APPENDIX— THE  SYSTEM 

It  has  been  suggested  that  I  give  in  a  brief  appendix 
a  general  outline  or  conspectus  of  my  entire  System  of 
Psychology,  in  so  far  as  it  has  developed  up  to  date 
(1920).  It  now  may  be  said  to  consist  directly  (omit- 
ting indirect  writings)  of  twenty-two  volumes,  contain- 
ing about  12,000  pages  (small  octavo).  So  we  are  here 
to  pass  from  the  biographic  order  which  has  been  fol- 
lowed hitherto  in  the  present  book,  to  the  systematized 
survey  of  the  whole  field  of  Psychology  in  its  special 
divisions,  of  which  I  give  in  advance  the  following 
three  leading  ones:  (I)  The  Psychological  Organon — 
the  creative  universal  Idea  and  its  inner  Organization; 
(II)  The  World  psychologized — the  Idea  realized  ex- 
ternally or  objectively — the  Macrocosm;  (III)  The  Self 
psychologized — the  Idea  realized  internally,  or  in  the 
individual  mind — the  Microcosm. 

Such  are  the  three  grand  stages  of  the  psychological 
Norm  of  the  Universe,  or  the  three  basic  lines  in  the 
organization  of  Universal  Psychology.  The  reader  may 
eompare  this  psychological  Norm  with  the  philosophical 
Norm,  which  usually  divides  itself  into  the  triplicity 
called  (1)  the  Absolute  (God)  (2)  the  World,  and  (3) 
Man. 

It  may  be  here  repeated  that  the  main  outcome  or  the 
fulfilment  of  the  St.  Louis  Movement  has  been  the 
evolution  and  elaboration  of  this  System  of  Universal 
Psychology,  whose  Norm  embraces  in  its  sweep  firstly 
the  Self  as  universal  psychologized  (Organon),  secondly 
the  World  psychologized  (Sciences),  thirdly  the  in- 
dividual Self  psychologized  (Biography).  The  follow- 
ing may  be  taken  as  the  System's  skeleton  embracing 
the  mentioned  twenty-two  volumes  and  giving  their 
order  and  titles. 

599 


600  APPENDIX— THE  SYSTEM. 


THE  PSYCHOLOGICAL  ORGANON 

This  sets  forth  the  universal  organizing  principle,  or 
genetic  center,  of  the  entire  System.  It  is  not  only 
creative  but  self-creative,  generating  all  and  itself  too. 
We  may  call  it  Pure  Psychology,  the  essential  Psyche^ 
the  ideal  Psychosis  as  it  is  in  itself  and  as  it  orders  it- 
self purely. 

Several  Organons  have  appeared  in  the  history  of 
Philosophy.  First  and  best  known  is  that  of  the  old 
Greek  Aristotle,  his  so-called  Logic,  mainly  deductive; 
then  by  way  of  reaction  comes  Bacon's  Novum  Organum, 
emphatically  inductive;  at  last  appears  Hegel's  Logic 
which  is  essentially  an  Organon  of  the  Universe  whose 
principle  is  the  Dialectic.  All  these  are  European 
philosophical  Organons,  distinct  from  the  present  psy- 
chological Organon,  whose  working  principle  is  the 
Psychosis.  The  treatment  of  this  subject  embraces  the 
following  three  volumes. 

(1)  Feeling,  With  Prolegomena.  This  unfolds  not 
merely  the  Feelings  of  the  individual  as  such,  but 
shows  the  whole  universe  of  God,  Nature,  and  Man 
reflecting  itself  in  the  Feelings  (pages  534). 

(2)  The  Will  and  Its  World.  The  place  of  the  Will 
in  the  Man  and  in  the  World  is  set  forth  in  its  various 
processes,  which  form  the  basis  of  individual  Freedom, 
of  Ethics  and  of  Institutions  (pages  575). 

(3)  Intellect  (Psychology  and  the  Psychosis).  This 
is  a  treatise  upon  the  self-ordering  Intellect  with  its 
three  fundamental  stages  of  Sense-perception,  Repre- 
sentation, and  Thought.  Doubtless  the  best  book  to 
start  with  in  studying  the  system  (pages  556). 

Thus  at  the  center  is  placed  Psychology  with  its 
Organon,  as  the  science  which  organizes  all  other 
sciences,  but  must  first  organize  itself.  This  starts 
with  the  individual  Self  (or  Ego)  as  the  point  which 
both  surveys  everything  else,  and  is  also  self-surveying, 
which  knows  itself  and  through  that  knows  the  World. 


APPENDIX— THE  SYSTEM.  601 

II 

THE  WORLD  PSYCHOLOGIZED 

The  World  here  means  all  externality  as  distinct 
from  the  Self,  hence  the  objective  side  of  existence. 
The  ideal  Psyche  is  now  realized;  the  pure  Psychosis 
is  seen  at  work  generating  its  vast  multiplicity  of  forms 
and  appearances,  and  at  the  same  time  co-ordinating 
them  into  an  ordered  totality.  Specially  here  is  un- 
folded the  World  as  Will,  as  Realisation;  hence  this  is 
the  second  stage  or  movement  of  the  Universe's  total 
Psychosis. 

The  present  main  division  of  Universal  Psychology 
embraces  the  following  six  departments  of  man's  ob- 
jective Universe,  which  are  also  the  race's  great  human 
disciplines,  beginning  with  the  first  and  most  external 
in  Nature,  and  rising  through  Art,  Literature,  Philos- 
ophy and  Institutions,  to  the  last  and  highest  in  Univer- 
sal History  with  its  World-Spirit.  In  thirteen  volumes, 
distributed  and  titled  as  follows: 

I.  Psychology  of  Nature  and  Natural  Science. 
This  starts  with  the  purest  externality  of  Nature  (Space 
and  Time)  and  unfolds  it  in  a  psychological  evolution 
to  its  supreme  manifestation  in  Nature's  Life.  The 
scientific  method  has  also  (like  Philosophy)  sought  to 
determine  Psychology,  and  is  still  in  vogue  for  this  pur- 
pose, though  apparently  waning,,  as  it  has  been  found 
too  narrow  for  the  subject-matter.  But  in  this  field, 
too,  Psychology  has  turned  the  tables  and  has  organized 
Nature  and  Natural  Science  instead  of  being  organized 
by  them.  Two  works  of  the  present  system  cover  the 
total  domain  of  Nature: 

(1)  Cosmos  and  Diacosmos.  These  two  terms  em- 
brace what  is  generally  included  under  Mechanics  (with 
Mathematics),  Physics,  and  Chemistry,  all  of  which  are 
seen  to  be  psychological  in  their   final  principle.     Also 


602  APPENDIX— THE  SYSTEM. 

is  unfolded  the  genesis  of  Nature  as  the  second  stage 
of  the  total  process  of  the  Universe  (pages  578). 

(2)  The  Biocosmos,  or  the  Life  of  Nature  psycholog- 
ically treated  and  embracing  the  science  of  Biology  in 
its  widest  sense.  This  is  the  third  part  of  Nature  as 
conceived  in  the  present  system   (pages  481). 

II.  Psychology  of  Art.  (Aesthetic).  Art  follows 
Nature  and  transfigures  the  same  with  a  new  meaning 
and  purpose,  essentially  social.  Art  has  been  philoso- 
phized in  Europe,  according  to  the  various  philosophical 
systems,  idealistic  and  realistic,  but  now  it  is  to  be 
psychologized  into  what  may  be  called  the  New 
Aesthetic.  That  is,  the  order  and  interpretation  of  the 
Fine  Arts  are  to  be  unfolded  by  Universal  Psychology, 
which  puts  them  into  their  place  in  the  cycle  of  man's 
activities,  and  also  gives  to  each  of  them  its  inner 
psychical  organization.  Art  is  conceived  not  merely  as 
a  revelation  of  man's  individual  life,  but  also  of  his 
Bocial  and  institutional  life,  and  finally  of  the  creative 
soul  of  the  Universe  itself.    Two  works: 

(1)  Architecture.  The  three  great  styles  of  artistic 
construction  are  shown  in  their  psychical  evolution- 
Oriental,  European  and  Occidental  (American).  That 
unique  manifestation  of  recent  Architecture,  the  High 
Building,  takes  its  place  as  one  of  the  supreme  forms  of 
this  Art  (pages  561). 

(2)  Music  and  the  Fine  Arts.  The  stress  is  upon 
Music  as  the  most  psychological  of  all  the  Fine  Arts 
and  the  most  modern,  though  it  be  ancient  too.  But 
also  Sculpture,  Painting  and  the  Kinetic  Arts  are  set 
forth  in  their  ultimate  psychical  order  and  significance. 
Likewise  is  given  a  survey  of  the  total  sweep  of  all  the 
Fine  (or  Presentative)   Arts  (pages  588). 

III.  (The  Psychology  of  Literature,  as  essentially 
the  Representative  Art  (Poetry,  Novel,  Belles-Lettres), 
is  to  be  classed  here  in  the  System,  though  I  shall  omit 
from  the  present  survey  my  works  on  the  four  Literary 
Bibles,  as  they  have  been  already  considered  in  their 
auto-biographic  relation.      Moreover,  they  were  not  for 


APPENDIX— THE  SYSTEM.  603 

me  an  evolution  of  Psychology  in  its  explicit  form,  but 
rather  Psychology  was  a  gradual  growth  out  of  them 
and  their  long  discipline.  So  their  nine  volumes  of 
Commentaries  have  been  listed  already,  as  they  were 
evolving  both  in  me  and  in  themselves  towards  Psy- 
chology. The  student  can,  however,  co-ordinate  them 
in  the  total  System  under  the  foregoing  head  of  the 
Psychology  of  Literature). 

IV.  Psychology  of  Philosophy  With  the  Latter's 
History.  The  preceding  branches — Nature,  Art,  Litera- 
ture— have  all  been  philosophized  in  the  past  according 
to  the  various  philosophical  Systems  of  Europe.  But 
now  all  these  Philosophies  are  to  be,  not  refuted  but 
subordinated  to  a  new  and  more  universal  World-prin- 
ciple, and  are  to  be  themselves  psychologized.  Thus 
Philosophy  in  its  final  outcome  reveals  itself  a  part  or 
phase  of  Psychology,  instead  of  the  reverse  as  hitherto. 
For  Philosophy  has  been  generally  regarded  as  the  ulti- 
mate Science,  as  the  Science  of  sciences.  It  seeks  to 
grasp  and  formulate  the  first  principle  of  the  Universe, 
and  then  to  apply  the  same  to  all  knowledge.  In  Euro- 
pean thought  Philosophy  has  had  the  primacy,  and  has 
on  the  whole  determined  the  sciences,  but  in  the  present 
system  Psychology  is  seen  supplanting  Philosophy  and 
determining  the  same  in  turn.  That  is,  Philosophy  it- 
self is  found  to  be  at  bottom  psychological  and  must  be 
newly  ordered  accordingly. 

(1)  Ancient  European  Philosophy,  which  gives  the 
evolution  of  ancient  Thought  from  Thales  to  Proclus, 
and  brings  to  the  surface  the  psychological  movement 
underlying  and  controlling  the  philosophical  (pages 
730). 

(2)  Modern  European  Philosophy,  which  does  the 
same  for  the  modern  movement  from  Descartes,  giving 
a  full  account  of  Hegel,  who  is  the  last  European 
philosopher  in  the  supreme  sense,  and  who  is  con- 
ceived as  transitional  to  Psychology  (pages  829). 


604  APPENDIX— THE  SYSTEM. 

V.  Psychology  op  Institutions  as  the  Forms  of 
Associated  Max.  At  present  mankind's  most  earnest 
endeavor  is  seeking  after  the  ways  in  which  human 
beings  can  be  best  associated.  Hence  the  stress  of  the 
time  is  upon  the  meaning  and  value  of  Institutions  as 
the  actualized  Forms  of  Associated  Man.  Especially 
the  State  and  the  Economic  Institution  are  just  now  in  a 
new  conflicting  evolution,  each  in  itself  and  with  the 
other.  Hence  the  most  timely  study  for  the  men  of 
to-day  is  that  of  Institutions,  which  are  being  assailed 
in  so  many  ways,  secretly  and  openly.  Especially  with 
Americans  the  chief  problem  is  to  become  conscious  of 
their  Institutions.  Moreover  the  relation  of  Institutions 
to  Art  and  Literature  is  fundamental,  and  furnishes  the 
deepest  content  to  artistic  and  literary  works.  In  this 
realm  are  two  books: 

(1)  Social  Institutions.  Under  this  head  the  five 
main  Institutions  of  man — domestic,  economic,  political, 
religious,  and  educational — are  here  put  together  for 
the  first  time,  being  treated  separately  and  as  a  whole 
(pages  615). 

(2)  The  State  in  which  is  especially  considered  the 
American  State,  with  the  psychological  exposition  of 
the  United  States  Constitution   (pages  561). 

(3)  The  Educative  Institution,  to  which  belongs  two 
specialized  books  on  Froebel's  Kindergarten:  (a)  Com- 
mentary on  Froeoels'  Mother  Play  Songs  (pages  439) 
and  (6)  Psychology  of  Froebel's  Play  Gifts  (pages 
396). 

VI.  Psychology  of  the  World's  History  and  Its 
Spirit.  In  the  last  half  dozen  years,  the  World  has 
made  more  History  both  national  and  universal,  than 
in  any  whole  century  of  its  previous  existence.  Hence 
the  World's  History  seems  to  have  turned  a  great  new 
Period  whose  creative  principle,  here  called  the  World- 
Spirit,  is  to  be  specially  studied  and  unfolded.  It  has 
long  been  recognized  that  a  Universal  Science  is  re- 
quired for  grasping  the  ultimate  processes  of  Universal 


APPENDIX— THE  SYSTEM.  605 

History.  Hence  arose  the  Philosophy  of  History,  being 
based  more  or  less  consciously  upon  some  philosophical 
system.  But  History  also,  as  one  manifestation  of  the 
Universal  Spirit,  must  get  the  final  organization  of  its 
processes  from  Psychology,  the  Universal  Science.  In 
this  field  are  the  three  following  works: 

(1)  European  History.  As  Europe  has  made  a  large 
part  of  recorded  History  so  far,  the  first  duty  is  to  put 
in  order  its  historic  processes,  and  to  set  forth  its  place 
in  Universal  History  (pages  691). 

(2)  The  Father  of  History.  Herodotus  is  the  most 
important  of  all  Historians,  recording  the  first  great 
historic  struggle  of  the  World's  History  and  showing 
the  dawn  of  the  historic  consciousness  (pages  538). 

(3)  The  American  Ten  Years'  War  (1855-1865). 
Our  Civil  War  is  set  forth  as  a  stage  in  the  evolution 
of  Universal  History,  with  its  underlying  psychological 
element   (pages  527). 

Next  result  is  that  this  universal  World's  History  with 
its  Spirit  embodied  in  time's  events  now  passes  to  the 
individual  Man's  Spirit  embodied  in  time's  events,  or 
in  his  life.  That  is,  World's  History  individualizes  it- 
self in  Life's  History,  or  Biography,  which  is  the  third 
stage  of  the  supreme  psychological  Norm  already 
given. 

Retrospect.  Thus  our  World-Psychology,  starting 
with  the  World's  uttermost  externality  in  Nature  has 
risen  to  its  innermost  creative  principle  in  the  World- 
Spirit.  Or  more  directly,  I,  having  psychologized  the 
World,  must  next  proceed  to  psychologize  the  Self  as 
individual;  or  more  directly  still,  I  must  psychologize 
myself  as  psychologist  in  the  process  of  psychologizing. 
Or  again:  I  having  recreated  the  external  cosmos,  now. 
I  must  recreate  myself  creating  it.  Only  when  you 
truly  psychologize,  do  you  become  your  true  Self  and 
fulfill  your  highest  vocation.  Preliminary  steps  to  this 
height  are  Philosophy,  Art,  Literature,  Science,  which 
must  themselves  be  organized  psychologically,  that  is, 
through  the  Psychological  Organon. 


606  APPENDIX— THE  SYSTEM. 


Ill 
THE  SELF  PSYCHOLOGIZED 

The  Psychological  Organon,  the  first  ideal,  or  ab- 
stract stage  of  the  Psychological  Norm,  now  realizes  it- 
self in  the  concrete  human  career,  or  incarnates  itself 
in  the  individual  Man  and  his  works.  The  original  and 
originating  Psychosis — Feeling,  Will  and  Intellect— is 
henceforth  to  be  made  actual  in  the  living  Person  and 
in  his  achievement.  Such  is  the  grand  psychical  in- 
carnation of  the  race.  If  the  Psychological  Organon  we 
saw  realize  itself  objectively  in  World-Psychology,  now 
we  are  to  see  that  same  creative  Organon  realize  itself 
subjectively  in  the  Self,  Ego,  individual  Psyche,  which 
is  the  theme  of  the  present  Self-Psychology,  or 
Biography.  Under  this  head  we  put  two  divisions  with 
a  possible  glimpse  of  a  third,  all  of  them  being  stages 
or  phases  of  the  one  Biography. 

I.  Gexebal  Biography.  This  is  the  common  kind,  in 
which  tbe  life  of  the  man  is  written  by  another  than 
himself.  If  we  may  coin  a  word  needed  for  this  species, 
let  it  be  called  Allo-biography,  that  is,  the  other-written 
Life,  as  distinct  from  the  self-written  Life,  or  Auto- 
biography. 

The  popular  reader  has  always  shown  a  chief  inter- 
est in  the  individual  lives  of  Great  Men.  But  a  science 
of  Biography  has  hardly  been  conceived  hitherto,  though 
ancient  Plutarch  already  thought  that  there  was  some 
common  principle  in  the  lives  of  the  eminent  Greeks 
and  Romans.  But  Psychology,  as  the  ultimate  science 
of  the  Self,  can  alone  furnish  the  universal  basis  of 
Biography,  elevating  it  into  a  science,  which  Philosophy 
never  did,  and  could  not. 

Here  are  placed  four  books  of  General  Biography 
(Allo-biography)  which  belong  by  their  treatment  to 
the  System  of  Universal  Psychology. 


APPENDIX— THE  SYSTEM.  ($7 

(1)  Abraham  Lincoln,  the'  Statesman,  whose  life  is 
in  this  work  unfolded  after  its  underlying  psychological 
order   (pages  574). 

(2)  Frederick  Froebel,  the  Educator,  whose  career 
repeals  the  inner  psychological  process  in  all  Biography 
(pages  470). 

(3)  Goethe's  Life-Poem — the  Poet's  Life  as  a  poem 
which  unfolds  itself  psychologically  through  its  three 
supreme  Periods  (pages  601). 

(4)  Emerson's  Life-Essay — which  reveals  psychically 
the  biography  of  himself  as  his  own  "Standard  Man." 
(In  type  but  not  yet  published). 

\  Here  may  be  mentioned,  as  being  in  preparation, 
'hakespeare's  Life-Drama  psychologically  treated  by  the 
utlior. 

II.  Auto-biography,  or  the  self-written  Life  of  the 
vriter  narrating  the  events  of  his  career  in  his  own 
vay,  Several  works  of  this  sort  have  been  very  famous, 
or  instance,  Rousseau's  and  Goethe's  Auto-biographies. 
)f  course  they  are  not  directly  psychologized. 

A  distinct  variety  of  Auto-biography  is  seen  when  it 
s  written  by  the  psychologist  who  psychologizes  his 
wn  particular  Life  as  a  manifestation  of  universal 
'sychology,  which  indeed  every  man's  Life  must  be. 

Two  works  of  Auto-biography  represent  this  phase 
.  f  th*  System: 

(1)  A  Writer  of  Books,  giving  the  main  events  of 
the  author's  life  as  he  unfolds  during  his  earlier  Period 
(pages  668). 

(2)  The  St.  Louis  Movement — the  present  book, 
showing  the  author  evolving  into  his  psychological 
world-\iew  through  Philosophy  and  Literature.  Here  I 
may  add,  as  I  am  alive  and  still  writing,  that  there  is 
another,  but  unfinished  part  of  this  Auto-biography. 

'Summary.  The  salient  character  of  Universal  Psy- 
chology may  be  indicated  in  the  fact  that  it  is  neither 
meta-physical  nor  physical  in  method  or  matter,  but 
purely  psychological. 


w 


608  APPENDIX—THE  SYSTEM. 

Slowly  the  science  of  Psychology  has  been  pushing  td 
the  front  as  the  Universal  Science.  But  it  has  been 
hitherto  handicapped  by  alien  methods  foisted  upon  it; 
so  we  have  had  chiefly  two  kinds:  the  old  Rational 
(so-called)  Psychology,  dominated  by  the  metaphysical 
system  of  some  philosopher,  and  the  more  recent  Phy 
siological  Psychology,  dominated  by  the  procedure  of 
Natural  Science.  The  present  system  maintains  a  vie 
opposite  to,  yet  inclusive  of  both  these  methods.  Psy 
chology  is  proclaimed  the  master  of  the  house,  no 
longer  the  subordinate;  it  is  to  organize  Philosophy 
and  Natural  Science,  and  not  to  be  organized  "by  them. 
It  is  the  new  Universal  Science  and  openly  asserts  it 
self  as  a  System  in  spite  of  to-day's  pragmatic  preju 
dice  against  all  systems. 

Here  we  may  again  emphasize  that  the  elementary 
principle  everywhere  pervading  and  originally  creating 
and  psychically  ordering  all  the  foregoing  divisions,  is 
the  Psychosis.     Such  is  the  universal  embryo  with  its 
remoter  parallel   in  the  Atom  or   unit  of  matter,  and 
with  its  nearer  parallel  in  the  Cell  or  unit  of  Life,  hot 
of  which  however,  are  forms  or  manifestations  of  thi 
ultimate  universally  genetic  unit  of  Mind.  The  psychical 
protoplast  we  may  conceive  it,  or  the  embryonic  arch 
type  of  the  Creator,  of  the  Creation,  and  of  me — th 
Psychosis. 


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